The Perl 5 porters are rather focused on perl 5.8.1 tuning and adjustments. Smokes, valgrind checks, modules updates, and regression bug hunting were among the main events of the week.
Last year, Simon Cozens found that blessed code references weren't DESTROYed properly (bug #10030). Dave Mitchell looked at it, and diagnosed that it's caused by the fact that the blessed anonymous subroutine is not a closure (usually) -- and indeed, turning it into a closure fixes the behaviour of the destructor. Dave thinks that this bug would be inefficient to fix, and suggests to document it as a misfeature.
Later in the thread, the proper meaning of the closure word is discussed.
http://xrl.us/qr5
Last week, Jarkko Hietaniemi added to the test harness the possibility to run the test suite under valgrind. This week, helped by Marcus Holland-Moritz and other members of the crowd, he slightly tweaked valgrind's setup to produce more useful and accurate reports. Some interesting bugs are shaked out.
http://xrl.us/qr6
$| Stas Bekman found a new bug in the localization of the $| variable.
This bug wasn't present in perl 5.8.0, and causes significant problems
with mod_perl 2. Dave Mitchell identified himself as the guilty patcher,
explained the problem, and provided a better version of his original
patch.
http://xrl.us/qr7
Jari Aalto wishes that here-documents could be declared with the quote
operators syntax, as in : <<q(FOO), <<qq(BAR), etc. (bug
#23348). This doesn't seem to be unreasonable.
Tassilo von Parseval added to Devel::PPPort, the backward compatibility
wrapper for XS code, some adapters for the grok_* functions, that
convert strings to numbers. (See a recent perlapi manpage for the
description of those functions.)
Enache Adrian fixed the handling of utf-8 strings in error messages.
Richard Dawe provided a portability patch for perl 5.6.2 on DJGPP. Philip Newton is testing perl 5.8.1 on DJGPP as well.
Michael G Schwern cleaned up a bit Pod::Html.
Alain (alian) Barbet was busy on the portability front. He found out that
some pack() tests fails on NetBSD/sparc, compiled with gcc 2.x. This is
apparently due (after investigating with Nicholas Clark) to a bug in
**. (bug #23463).
Alain also released a new version of his Test-Smoke-Database distribution on CPAN, a software that presents and summarizes smoke results via a web interface.
Abigail started to produce smoke results for perl 5.6.2. One of the tests
for int() fails when perl 5.6.2 is compiled with 64 bit arithmetic, due to
a transitional known bug in his version of glibc. (A workaround for
this bug was put in perl 5.8.0.)
Dan Kogai released Encode 1.98. Michael Schwern released ExtUtils::MakeMaker 6.16. And I see on CPAN that CGI.pm 3.00 is out.
Moreover, Ken Williams proposed to backport Cwd to CPAN, with the recent tainting fixes in it.
http://xrl.us/qr4
This week's summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries are published weekly on http://use.perl.org/ and on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org . Comments and corrections are welcome.