Any busy week for the porters, ends with a busy week-end for the summarizer (old saying). Your traditional weekly summary is out, and many subjects of interest are featured inside.
Elizabeth Mattijsen asks for a way to know whether hash seed randomization is in effect or not in perl 5.8.1 or above.
A first hint is to look at the Config variable $Config{ccflags} to see
whether -DNO_HASH_SEED has been specified or not, indicating whether
perl's support for random hash seeding is turned on. But there's also a
runtime setting involved, the PERL_HASH_SEED environment variable ; and
Config is not intended to store settings that vary at runtime. Finally,
Jarkko Hietaniemi added a function hash_seed() to the core module
Hash::Util, that returns the seed, (and consequently 0 when no seed is
used.)
The discussion then digresses about ways to make Config.pm or charnames.pm
lighter.
http://xrl.us/str
Talking about making modules lighter, Elizabeth submitted several patches
to reduce the memory usage of some heavy modules, (Config and
warnings), when used in a multithreaded perl application. She achieved
this by replacing some carefully chosen lexical variables by global
variables declared with the:unique attribute, so they're shared
between threads.
But Liz' patch to warnings uncovered a bug, by an amusing side-effect
(it triggerred a failure in the regression test for O.pm) : in a perl
interpreter configured without threads, declaring a variable with the:unique attribute loads the attributes module, which shouldn't be
necessary for built-in attributes. This was fixed by Rafael, just in time
for the 5.8.1 code freeze.
The regression tests that Andreas Koenig wrote for the debugger last week were proven to be rather unportable, as multiple test failures showing up in the smoke matrices demonstrated. Jarkko retracted them, waiting for the debugger to be made more testable (e.g. by making it able to read commands from a file, and write output to another file.) And he added, half jokingly : if someone desperately needs a hobby, for 5.10 I would suggest a mad^Wambitious project of rewriting the debugger from scratch.
http://xrl.us/tdp
http://xrl.us/tdq
Some of the smoke tests on Cygwin were showing alarming failures lately.
They're difficult to trace, because, as Jarkko says, the configurations
people have vary a lot, and what works over here won't work over there,
and vice versa... Radu Greab finally found that the blame was to be put
on a bug in getpwuid_r() in the latest Cygwin (1.5.3-1). Jarkko then
checked in gratefully Radu's patch, labelling it as Radu Greab is my
hero.
Smylers usefully pointed at a statement by Larry that clarifies the
position of Perl 5 and Perl 6 about the definedness of evalution order of
complex expressions, that was discussed lask week
http://xrl.us/tdr
is_deeply() There was some discussion about the proper semantics of
Test::More::is_deeply() between Fergal Daly and Tony Bowden, that spawned
several mailing lists (p5p, code-review-ladder and perl-qa so far.) Should
it ignore the packages the references might have been blessed into ?
Should it do it even when those packages overload operators that may have
influenced the comparison routines ? What is the final and definitive
answer ?
http://xrl.us/tds
Peter Prymmer is working on the portability of perl on VMS. Notably he was
sorting out with Ken Williams what should be the policy of File::Spec
regarding operating systems where filesystems use volume names. Ken
released new alpha versions of File::Spec. See for example
http://xrl.us/teh
Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan discusses about possible optimizations on regular
expressions that begin with a atom that potentially matches the null
string, such as/\s*,\s*/.
http://xrl.us/tdt
Jos Boumans remarks that perl accepts to run a directory, sort of.
http://xrl.us/teg
Abigail reports bug #23790, about foreach() being unable to iterate
correctly over a list returned by a lvalue subroutine.
Redvers Davies is interested in updating the minimal files that are absolutely needed to get a core perl compiled and running. He needs this information to release packages for the Zaurus. (The list can be found at the end of the INSTALL document.)
John Peacock released version.pm version 0.32.
This week's summary was crafted by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries are published weekly on use.perl.org and on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org . Corrections and comments are welcome.