This week, discussions spawned across : manual pages, and their adaptation to perl's audience ; build problems ; interfaces ; conventions ; and the usual amount of bugs.
Shlomi Fish proposed successive incarnations of several patches to the perlsyn and perldata manpages. Casey West, Tom Christiansen, and others, commented.
Looking at Shlomi's patches, Michael G Schwern noticed a lot of references to other languages in perl's core documentation -- mostly to Unixish little languages (sed and awk) and to C. In spite of their historical interest, those references are no longer relevant to most readers of those documents nowadays. So he decided to do something about it.
http://xrl.us/h7g
And by the way, while Casey posted a patch to replace all occurrences of catenate by concatenate, Tom explained the subtle difference between those two words.
http://xrl.us/h7h
Johan Vromans uploaded to the CPAN an alpha version of his module Getopt::Long (2.32_03) which implemented automatic support for --version and --help flags (based on a patch by Ilya Zakharevich). Quoting the announcement : Since this is a non-compatible API change, the new features will only be available to programs that explicitly require version 2.3203 or later.
This unconventional way to enable these new features was discussed and adapted, after the problems it caused were sorted out.
http://xrl.us/h7i
For the latest state of the module (2.32_05), see
http://xrl.us/h7j
http://search.cpan.org/src/JV/Getopt-Long-2.32_05/CHANGES
Gerrit P. Haase and H. Merijn Brand were investigating build problems under the latest snapshots of the Cygwin environment (1.5.0s). At some point they suspected a broken header file, but the problem seems to be deeper. Anyway, bleadperl builds (almost) correctly on the more stable Cygwin 1.3.22.
Enache Adrian tried to build bleadperl on Windows 2000 with MS Visual C.
He gets several failures, and also reminds us about bug #21473 (sysread()
and syswrite() don't process CRLF correctly).
http://xrl.us/h7k
Alain Barbet gets smoke failures, building perl on NetBSD on a Sparc 64 hardware, but apparently upgrading gcc helps a lot. He's going to try with the very recent gcc 3.3, that has also been installed by Merijn on his smoke systems. However, perl + long doubles still fails on AIX 4.3.3 with this latest compiler.
David Nicol remarks that the (little-known) multidimensional array
emulation works when written $hash{$x,$y}, but not in the construct
$hash{@array}. That's because the subscript must be a list, so it's
necessary to employ some syntactic trick, as $hash{@array,()} to get it
working.
http://xrl.us/h7l
Later, Rafael asks whether this feature should be deprecated, and after discussion, the answer appears to be no.
http://xrl.us/h7m
Elaine Ashton noticed that the documented method of denoting an alpha
module release and the way that PAUSE and search denote them do not
match. This remark was triggered by the upload on CPAN of a module that
has a X_YY-style version number. search.cpan.org understands this
to be an alpha version number, while PAUSE, for doing so, requires that
the distribution filename matches/d\.\d+_\d/, and moreover it looks
into the module(s) for $VERSION scalars.
http://xrl.us/h7n
Back in January, Jarkko Hietaniemi asked for a couple of new README documents, README.macosx and README.linux. But they were never written. Perhaps before 5.8.1 ?
Jarkko also released a maintenance snapshot, and he asked, for the last time, for a list of most wanted fixes to go in 5.8.1.
Tassilo von Parseval, who remarked last month that h2xs was not able to
handle C enums, proposed a patch for it. It adds an -e/--omit-enums
command-line option, to disable the proposed new default behavior, that
is to process enums. (Bug #21887.)
Ilya Sandler reported bug #22181, a case of core-dump involving a
combination of foreach() and goto(). Dave Mitchell and Enache Adrian
hunted it down.
Dave Mitchell remarked that the construct $hash{$foo}, where $foo is
undefined, doesn't give a warning when %hash is empty. That would be a
bug.
Michael Fowler reported a weird parsing bug (#22231) caused by the presence
of the Switch module in a program, and of a comment containing the word
"switch".
MIME::Base64 was upgraded.
This summary was brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are available on http://use.perl.org/ and via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org . Feedback is (as always) welcome.