All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

This Week on perl5-porters (6-12 October 2003)

rafael on 2003-10-13T12:45:00

    summary++ # new week.

5.8.x binary compatibility

Chip Salzenberg notices some binary incompatibility issues between perl 5.8.0 and perl 5.8.1 : some XS modules built under 5.8.0 don't run properly with 5.8.1 without being recompiled. This is due to the new hash randomization feature. Running perl 5.8.1 with the environment variable PERL_HASH_SEED=0 fixes it. Chip suggests a more general fix -- basically to move the hash seed to a global variable instead of a function argument -- and says that 5.8.2 should be released quickly. His idea is further discussed.

    http://xrl.us/wuu

XS Constants and threads

Michael J.Pomraning reports (bug #24138) that the value returned by File::Glob::GLOB_ERROR() does not seem to be isolated between differents threads. Rafael tries to trace the bug up to ExtUtils::Constant, with no success.

    http://xrl.us/wuv

When you load UNIVERSAL

Slaven Rezic reports that explicitely loading the UNIVERSAL module breaks things, because UNIVERSAL.pm defines an import() method (aliased to Exporter::import()), which is thus inherited by all classes whenever UNIVERSAL.pm has been use'd. Michael G Schwern provides a patch, ensuring that UNIVERSAL::import() does nothing when invoked on anything else than the UNIVERSAL package.

    http://xrl.us/wuw

set*uid calls broken on Mac OS X

Bug report #24122 details how the C library calls setruid, setrgid, setreuid, and setregid are broken on Mac OS X, and how they affect, consequently, perl's $< and $( variables, for scripts that want to drop privileges. Slaven Rezic suggested that they should be disabled at configuration time.

    http://xrl.us/wux

Filetest operators syntax

Ton Hospel reported (bug #24127) that filetest operators don't follow the rule that applies to other named unary operators, if it looks like a function it's a function. Rafael Garcia-Suarez documented this fact more clearly in the perlop manpage.

    http://xrl.us/wuy

Following his internal stream of consciousness, Rafael then submitted a patch to allow to stack filetest operators, i.e. to write :

    -f -w -x $file

instead of :

    -x $file && -w _ && -f _

although he doesn't think that allowing -fwx $file in Perl 5 would be a good idea.

    http://xrl.us/wuz

Extending the defined() and exists() syntax

Roy Johnson posted some insteresting ideas about possible extensions to defined() and exists().

    http://xrl.us/wu2

Handling attributes at runtime

Daisuke Maki found out that attribute handlers are not invoked when defined in a file sourced at run-time. That's because they're by default run at CHECK-time, and CHECK blocks are only invoked once during the lifetime of the perl interpreter : just after the global compilation phase.

    http://xrl.us/wu3

When you goto +foo

Juerd reported (bug #24108) that you can't goto +foo to go to the label whose name is returned by the function foo(), because perl actually tries to go to SCALAR(0xDEADBEEF), the stringified form of the reference to the return value of foo(). xmath proposed a fix, that got applied.

    http://xrl.us/wu4

When ref($foo) == 0

Abigail remarked that Perl's documentation says that ref returns a true value if its argument is a reference, and false otherwise, and that this statement is not entirely true, since it's possible to bless a reference into a class named 0. This edge case was sufficient to give birth to a long thread.

    http://xrl.us/wu5

When a module loses its XS part

James FitzGibbon notices that pure-perl modules are installed later in the @INC path than XS modules. Consequently, if an XS module on CPAN is replaced by a pure-perl version, it won't be seen by the users who will upgrade it, hidden by the earlier version, still on the hard disk. Nick Ing-Simmons proposes a solution : that this module still insists to be installed in the architecture-dependent directory. Michael G Schwern also points out that the prudent user can issue a make install UNINST=1, that searches @ISA for other versions of the same files and remove them.

    http://xrl.us/wu6

When you use a Turkish locale

Ismail Donmez reported (bug #24121) that perl's Configure script can't be run under a Turkish locale, because it actually tests for the uppercase form of the letter 'i', which is not 'I' in Turkish (it actually corresponds to Unicode character U+0130, also known as "\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE}").

    http://xrl.us/wu7

In Brief

Hugo van der Sanden is planning to release the first development version after the 5.8 branch, i.e. perl 5.9.0, during next week.

Jos Boumans reports as bug #24182 that objects seem to loose their overload magic during destruction (except when the DESTROY method is called explicitely).

Gisle Aas, by (ab)using an undocumented feature (not unrelated to source filters and @INC hooks), made perl dump core; later, he provided a fix.

Nick Ing-Simmons compared MANIFEST files to mitochondrial DNA.

About this summary

This week's summary was written by your regular summarizer, 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.