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Ken Williams, who is going to release the Cwd module on CPAN, wants to backport it to perl 5.005. However, this involves replacing XSLoader, that it uses, by the older DynaLoader -- or, to use a backward compatible boilerplate -- or, ultimately, to release on CPAN XSLoader itself, as Michael Schwern suggested.
In fact, Michael even provided a small tarball of XSLoader, repackaged for CPAN. He also wrote tests for it and cleaned it up a bit.
http://xrl.us/rsv
http://xrl.us/rsw
While we're at it : Randal L. Schwartz reported that the version of the
base module on CPAN (in the Class-Fields distribution) was higher than
the one currently included in perl 5.8.1.
Michael Schwern says that a backport of base and fields must remain
on CPAN. It's important to note that the CPAN and core versions of those
modules are functionally equivalent, their only difference being purely
internal. He added that Class::Field is a failure and should be left dying
slowly. Nevertheless, he separated the CPAN version of base and
fields from Class::Fields, which is going to CPAN as base-2.0. He
also mentions that he's bored with those modules and would welcome
someone to take over the CPAN version.
http://xrl.us/rsx
next $label Mark-Jason Dominus wishes (bug #23614) that next could support dynamic
labels, specified via a variable. (goto supports this.) Enache Adrian
remarks that this isn't probably worth the performance penalty. Schwern
quotes Larry.
http://xrl.us/rsz
Nicholas Clark posted the code of spambench, a simple script aimed at
benchmarking a perl interpreter against SpamAssassin and a known email
corpus.
His results so far : copy-on-write doesn't seem to make a difference in speed (perhaps in memory usage ? there aren't memory statistics), and a perl interpreter compiled with ithread support is slower by 4/5%.
http://xrl.us/rs2
Mark-Jason Dominus proposed a patch to improve the performance of Pod::Parser. However, Marek Rouchal (who maintains Pod::Parser) rejected it, for reasons pertaining to the correctness of the algorithm : he wants the parse tree to contain no empty nodes and no consecutive text nodes. Marek also says that Pod::Simple is nowadays considered a better alternative to write pod parsers backends.
http://xrl.us/rs3
tell() in append mode Martyn Pearce reports bug #23645 : tell() returns 0 after having opened a
file in append mode with perl 5.8.x ; but perl 5.6.x returns the real file
position. Andreas Koenig finds that the patch that changed the behaviour
of tell() is a patch to the Linux compilation hints file, and indeed the
bug disappears if perl is configured with -Dd_stdstdio=define. Jarkko
commited a fix, but labels it as probably wrong.
http://xrl.us/rs4
Tim Jenness released File::Temp 0.14 (last week, in fact).
Lukas Mai reported that the prototypes for shift() and pop() should be;\@ instead of \@. Rafael fixed this, and added a regression test
for the prototypes of built-ins. (bug #23572.)
David Coppit reported (bug #23578) that the delete_package() function
provided by the Symbol module is sometimes so zealous that the deleted
package can't be reloaded efficiently. Rafael explained this (and why it
won't probably be fixed in a near future.)
http://xrl.us/rs5
Nicholas Clark filed a couple of bugs that were uncovered by valgrind
(#23753, #23576). One of them involves matching something against a
regular expression, and then introducing $& at run-time via an
eval('').
Tassilo von Parseval found a strange bug involving the scoping of @- and @+, used in a tied hash, accessed from the right-hand side of a substitution (bug #23624). But the workaround is even stranger.
http://xrl.us/rs6
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. Yes I know, I'm not good at haikus.