Welcome to our latest edition of the P5P summary, for which I'm sure you have been waiting. This week, you'll read about considerations on Storable, nice improvements to the debugger, bugs, and other interesting subjects.
Richard Jelinek was wondering about the reason why the Storable module
sometimes uses so much memory when large hashes are stored. Nicholas Clark
explained some of the inner workings of Storable, which needs to keep
track of every element it stores, in order to avoid duplicates; and he
suggests that maybe using a DB file would be a better idea. Mark-Jason
Dominus suggests to add an option to Storable to avoid the duplicate
check; this would reduce memory consumption, at the expense of cloning the
data structures at retrieval-time.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040514211002.A21640%40petamem.com
Richard Foley sent a patch to implement backwards stepping in the perl debugger. He explains: Stepping backwards is made possible by using a true history (earlier save command), and rerunning the debugger to the indicated command, or to so-many steps backwards, or to the current position.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200405111104.11484.richard.foley%40rfi.net
Jim Cromie supplied a patch to provide an explanation for the -D
debugging command-line switch, when it's invoked with wrong suboptions.
He also added some search options for the -V: option, which enables to
search through perl's configuration variables.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40A06F92.1070607%40divsol.com
Til Schubbe found a regexp bug (#29538). He provides the example of a
regular expression that behaves correctly with/i, but not without,
even though there is no letter in the regexp. Jeff Pinyan provided some
technical analysis, but no fix (yet).
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.9-29538-87310.6.72801110403121%40per l.org
Jan Dubois notices that one cannot write a file in some encodings on
Windows (with the example of ucs2le) because the output file will be
corrupted by spurious CRLF end-of-line conversions. (The:crlf layer is
present by default under Windows.) Adding a:raw PerlIO layer is
necessary to get the correct final encoding.
Dan Kogai comments that UCS-2 should always be treated as binary, which sounds like a sane idea.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200405150041.i4F0fQjh003739%40smtp3.ActiveS tate.com
Rafael patched XSLoader to record the paths of loaded@DynaLoader::dl_shared_objects.
Encode 2.00 was released by Dan Kogai. In spite of the name, that's not a
new major version release, that's only 1.99++
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 . Comments and corrections welcome.