Besides the release of a new maintenance version of perl, this week passed and carried its usual heterogeneous load of bugs. Read below for all the details.
Perl 5.8.3 was released (as expected.) The announcement and its laudatory follow-ups can be seen at:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040114192716.GA13579%40Bagpuss.unfortu.ne t
Wolfgang Laun proposed a huge patch implementing many fixes and improvements to formats. The details are to be found in his announcement:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=DF27CDCBD2581D4B88431901094E4B4D02B0C4D3%40 attmsx1
However one of the tests added by his patch fail on some architectures. (bug #24927.) This is to be investigated.
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes asked some questions about the next development release of Perl, to be numbered 5.9.1: what features are going to be in it?
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040111213417.GD2348%40efn.org
It was found that chop() and chomp() mangle UTF-8-encoded strings (bugs
#24888 and #24926). Fixes were proposed.
Abigail found out a complex regular expression that apparently corrupts memory somehow. (bug #24898). Wolfgang Laun proposed a patch.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24898-69991.2.12654944284594%40per l.org
Thomas Bayen found a very strange bug, (#24905), that was quickly fixed by Dave Mitchell.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24905-70016.12.3769365894331%40per l.org
Bug #24914 demonstrates a case of segmentation fault involving closures. Dave Mitchell proposed a fix, but it turned out to be unperfect, causing a regression test to hang under some conditions.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24914-70050.17.1879051837409%40per l.org
Merijn Brand notices that the line
open my $fs, $path or return;
produces a warning Parentheses missing around ``my'' list. This warning is actually produced by the perl parser by using some rough heuristics, for which Sadahiro Tomoyuki proposed an improvement.
Steve Grazzini reports that
sub f : unique {}
is a quick and efficient way to make perl segfault. (bug #24940.)
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org . Corrections and comments are welcome.