New week, new summary, from the hands of our newly recruited summarizer. This time, thoughts on cross-compilation, threads, BSD, scary internals stuff, and other things.
Alexander Povolotsky, lacking a native compiler on Linux PPC, tried to crosscompile from Cygwin (Intel). Many people admonished that while crosscompiling perl is possible in principle, there's little support for it, so getting the native compiler in place would probably be easier.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00039.html
John Gardiner Myers reported (bug #31851) a bug in threads where
$thread->join prematurely frees a closure because the CVs' op tree refcount
isn't thread safe. [Please correct this explanation if necessary.]
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00065.html
Abe Timmerman's new smoke machine, a FreeBSD-running sparc64, failed with what might be an integer-size configuration problem.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00071.html
Boris Zentner, trying to remove duplicate hash values
%h = reverse (%x = reverse %h);
discovered a fascinating bug (#31865) in assigning duplicate keys to a hash, pinpointed by Rick Delaney (and Devel::Peeked by Graham Barr):
$ perl5.8.3 -le 'print (%x = ("a",1,"b",2,"b",3));'
bb
$ perl5.6.1 -le 'print (%x = ("a",1,"b",2,"b",3));'
a1bb3
(should be 'a1b3').
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00073.html
Dave Mitchell set the stage for fixing the behaviors of (?{...}) and
regex objects, by making regcomp receive the components of run-time
regexes ($a, '-', $b in/$a-$b/) as a list rather than a concatenation
of the components. Commentators oohed and aahed as the chessmaster advanced
his pawn. [If you're an internals novice like me, try understanding Dave's
before and after B::Concise output, using B::Concise (what do the
flags mean?), perlguts (the ``Compiled code'' section), and perlcall
(what's a PUSHMARK?).]
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00132.html
Peter Dintelmann found a problem (bug #31864) in IO::Poll, where its
mask method incorrectly evaluated an undef argument as 0 (STDIN).
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00072.html
Vadim Konovalov continued his Dynaloader patching from the previous week, and while he was at it enabled statically linked extensions for Win32. More fixes to come.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00034.html http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00126.html
Encode 2.03 - Dan Kogai
Module::Build 0.26 - Ken Williams
From Dave Mitchell's sig:
Any [programming] language that doesn't occasionally surprise the novice will pay for it by continually surprising the expert. -- Larry Wall
The thread for bug number $BUGNUM can be found at http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=$BUGNUM.
This summary was written by Scott Lanning. Summaries are published weekly at http://use.perl.org/ and posted to a mailing list whose subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. The archive is at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Comments and corrections welcome.