Perl 5.8.1 was released. 'Nuff said.
Jarkko Hietaniemi began the week by releasing the last candidate, perl 5.8.1 RC 5, which was extensively tested on all available platforms and with lots of CPAN modules.
Then, three days later, he finally uploaded the final tarball of 5.8.1 to the CPAN, leaving for a well-deserved vacation, applauded by the whole crew for his wonderful job.
The Official Announcement : http://xrl.us/uoz
Jarkko retiring from pumpkineering (a word that ispell must be told about), Nicholas Clark is now the new 5.8.x maintenance pumpking. Public acclamations.
The Plan for 5.8.x : http://xrl.us/uo7
Andy Lester announced the Phalanx project, aimed at creating a solid testing base for Perl 5 and Ponie, through extensive tests of the most important CPAN modules.
http://xrl.us/uwf
http://qa.perl.org/phalanx/
-i and symbolic linksPekka Savola reports (bug #24000) that when perl is given the -i switch
(in place edition of input files), the symbolic links are replaced by
modified plain files, but the file they point to is not modified. Although
perl could be made to edit the linked files through @ARGV modification,
it's not clear what kind of DWIMmery should be implemented here by
default, the old one being at least backwards-compatible. Aaron Sherman
points out that the behavioral change would be better done at the C level,
and not via an error-prone perl module (due to symlink chains and other
relative pathnames madness).
http://xrl.us/uwg
log() Tels reports that it's not possible to overload log() (via the overload
pragma) and make it accept more than one parameter. (Bug #24016). Rafael
suggests to define an overriding log() subroutine instead. Mark-Jason
Dominus gives further details.
http://xrl.us/uwh
:locked attributeElizabeth Mattijsen notices that the:locked subroutine attribute,
documented in the attributes manpage, is relevant only to the old
5005threads model. Then she makes a patch to turn it into a compile-time
error if used with ithreads, intended to go in 5.8.x. But support for:locked should be completely removed from the 5.9.x branch, as
5005threads are no longer supported.
http://xrl.us/uwi
The code snipped that was posted last week by Stas Bekman and that produced a Modification of a read-only value attempted error in bleadperl is now permitted again. Rafael fixed it in a way that, when a magic variable is localized, the readonly flag is propagated only if its kind of magic can handle value affectations. This should protect from bugs as well as minimizing the annoyance for the programmer.
Rick Delaney proposed a patch to fix the behaviour of require() setting or
not setting keys in %INC when it tries to load a module that has
compilation errors. His patch arranges for failures to be cached in %INC
as undefined values.
Mark-Jason Dominus reports that overloaded operators don't seem to work with blessed functions (bug #24033). Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes explains that the issue is that the overload magic flag is on the reference, not on the referent.
David Buckley reported a couple of segfault cases in Data::Dumper, involving threads and/or large recursive structures (bugs #23965 and #24013).
Gabor Szabo looks for the P5P FAQ. The old FAQ Simon Cozens crafted is now
outdated. Rafael promises to update it, and Robert Spier to upload it
to http://dev.perl.org/
Tels released Math::BigInt 1.66, just in time for 5.8.1.
This week's summary was produced 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 . Corrections and comments are welcome. Next week, I'll take a break, and will be kindly replaced by Elizabeth Mattijsen.