Mathoms, fixes, hobbits, speedups, all of them together advancing the development of Perl.
Nicholas Clark rolled out a maint snapshot towards 5.8.8. He called for reports of success and failure while stuff integration from blead to maint goes on. In the followups, OS X Tiger and Mandriva Linux seemed to be quite happy with the current state of maint. Nicholas' plan hopes to see another snapshot about a week later and probably 5.8.8 RC1 one week after this.
Nicholas' announcement
http://xrl.us/h896
The snapshot
http://opensource.fotango.com/user/nclark/perl-25817.tar.bz2
Jarkko Hietaniemi posted the findings of cut-and-paste code on blead@25827. That triggered a discussion on how to deal with repeated code, why it is worthy and when it could be desirable.
http://xrl.us/h897
sort() Right Robin Houston had no rest this week fighting battles with recursive sorts and issues on fiddling with active subs.
Robin started wondering about the rationale
behind the "Can't redefine active sort sub" thing and
found a number of bugs in the way. These bugs
were related to oversights in doing multiple calls
to subroutines and affected sort() as well
List::Util. To solve the issue, Robin thought
of a set of macros *MULTICALL* for repeatedly
calling the same sub and intented to make easier
to get right code like the sort implementation.
http://xrl.us/h898
Robin showed yet another subtle bug when you
call sort() with a sort sub that's already active.
http://xrl.us/h899
Ben Tilly, the requestor of RT ticket #36430, explained Robin what exactly made the ticket issue unlike the one of bug #7063.
http://xrl.us/h9aa
Then, Robin prepared drafts of his so-called sort/multicall
patch. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes prodded for tests and Graham Barr
(the maintainer of List::Util) asked for description
of what really changes and how compatibility may be preserved/restored.
First draft
http://xrl.us/h9ab
Second draft
http://xrl.us/h9ac
Getting there
http://xrl.us/h9ad
pp_push() Gets Faster Tassilo von Parseval stumbled at a comment at pp.c
and found a good opportunity to speed up pp_push()
for the case of pushing multiple elements. Yitzchak
Scott-Thoennes had comments and suggestions that led
Tassilo to write a more effective patch, illustrated
by benchmarks hinted by H.Merijn Brand. Rafael applied it
as change #25854.
http://xrl.us/h9ae
Back in June, Nicholas Clark suggested the name mathoms.c, for a file holding C functions still kept around for binary compatibility reasons. (For the record, mathoms will be yet another Tolkien's reference in Perl source code.) This week, Steve Peters made it happen with a patch to create the new file and a configure switch to turn on/off the inclusion of the file in the build. Ronald J. Kimball and Philip M. Gollucci played the part of the ones who don't like the name. Rafael Garcia-Suarez thought Steve's patch would break build on everything but Unix. Steve asked for pointers on what files would need editing in other environments and, confronted with golden silence, found those files and made what was necessary, applying change #25866.
Nicholas coins the file name
http://xrl.us/h9af
Steve Peters gets mathoms together
http://xrl.us/h9ag
Panic with Multiple Encodings
Ken Hirsch reported bug #37526 which shows
how using multiple encodings at once
may cause panic (more exactly,
"panic: sv_setpvn called with negative strlen").
http://xrl.us/h9ah
Reconciled 3-arg Opens
Ken Hirsch reported yet another problem with
PerlIO encoding layers. This time, in RT ticket #37533,
he noticed that three-arg opens seem to always
ignore default layer settings by the open pragma.
Furthermore, he pointed an issue that Rafael Garcia-Suarez
considered a contradiction between
the open pragma documentation and perlfunc.
Rafael produced a patch to reconcile the 3-arg
opens with the open pragma settings and suggested
to settle the perlfunc behavior as the correct one.
http://xrl.us/h9ai
Bas van Sisseren in bug #37527 reported the parser
was having trouble with regexes delimited with []
and backslashes. Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan elucidated the
gory details which Rafael Garcia-Suarez believed
to be documented in perlop, although not very clearly.
Bas proceeded to patch B::Deparse which he was using
when he met the problem.
http://xrl.us/h9aj
Joseph Thames exposed a maintenance issue at
his actual work environment using Perl,
Apache, mod_perl and various CPAN modules
with very demanding requirements. He was
looking for a scalable solution minimizing
configuration, preferably with native
executables and wondered if there was
a standard way of using early-bound
Perls rather than the dynamic traditional
way. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes advised about the highly
experimental nature of B::C or B::CC
approaches and about PAR as a candidate
for the job. He also referred Joseph could
reach a wider audience by asking at perlmonks.org.
John Peacock suggested him to also evaluate perl2exe
in his context.
http://xrl.us/h9ak
IO::File Once Again Pratik noticed that a recent change at IO::File introduced
a call to File::Spec->rel2abs() which uses Cwd
that in turn forks a new process to determine the working
directory. This led to a major performance hit. Gisle Aas
explained the change was due to fixing a failure in Windows
and soon found a way to fix the situation with a 3-arg
open instead of munging with file names. Steve Peters
applied and that made Pratik happy and eager to see
the fix in 5.8.x branch as well.
http://xrl.us/h9am
IO::Socket Peter Millington had a multi-threaded application
and found some trouble when using IO::Socket and
Net::FTP in such environment. He asked whether
the corresponding objects are believed to be thread-safe
and explained how he worked around the issue with a change
to IO::Socket::Net::configure().
Rafael Garcia-Suarez confirmed there may be
problems with IO::Socket and threads,
called for a patch in unified diff format
and greeted opinions on other points raised by Peter.
http://xrl.us/h9an
utime's Turn In July, Gisle Aas set a trend on
taking advantage of the corresponding C fxxx() functions
to implement builtins like chmod, fchown, and
fchdir. This time, Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes
proposed to make utime use futimes where available.
Gisle Aas backed it up and waits for somebody
to add Configure probes for futimes.
Gisle's start
http://xrl.us/h9ao
Yitzchak's turn
http://xrl.us/h9ap
Tassilo von Parseval wondered whether perl could try to
use the biggest available native integer type for left
bit-shift operations. Adriano Ferreira believed perl would
better stick to its configure/build-time integer types
and bigint pragma would be there
for arbitrary precision integer arithmetic. Tassilo
and Tels pointed the inconvenience of the performance
hit when using Math::BigInt. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes
foresaw trouble in upgrading IV to NV types for
integer-type operations like shifts.
http://xrl.us/h9aq
VMS failure summary After a failure summary of blead on VMS by John E. Malmberg, Rafael Garcia-Suarez thanked John (in the name of all perl5 porters and lovers, I dare to say) and gave a clue on making tests more portable.
http://xrl.us/h9ar
VMS exit handling After sorting out most of the issues in exit handling in VMS, John E. Malmberg asked for help to make it right once and for all. In fact, he did work out his own way and regretted not being able to change the default behavior due to the compatibility burden, which was commented by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. And then John posted what he expects to be the last VMS exit/error fixes that were needed.
Call for help
http://xrl.us/h9as
Hopefully the last fixes
http://xrl.us/h9at
vms.c improvements and fixes
John E. Malmberg introduced in vms.c a new
do_mp_rmsexpand() to support longer filenames
for platforms/versions where it makes sense.
While on this, he fixed memory leaks in old
do_mp_rmsexpand() and made code safer with
memmove() replacing memcpy().
http://xrl.us/h9au
sprintf on VMS
John E. Malmberg posted a minor change to reflect
the fact that sprintf in VMS returns the length
of the buffer.
http://xrl.us/h9av
This week, Nicholas Clark and Jarkko Hietaniemi discussed what changes would
be needed to make Encode work with the constraint of non-writeable
data on Symbian. The issue at stage was how changes in underlying structure
types would break compatibility among Encode and older format
encode tables.
http://xrl.us/h9aw
Jarkko also announced better support for Series 80 devices and some handy utilities for Perl on Symbian.
http://xrl.us/h9ax
Cygwin, unlink, Win32
Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni noticed how weird Perl on Cygwin
can be when issuing code like this:
open FILE, '>', $file;
unlink $file or warn $!;
opendir DIR, '.';
print "here yet" if grep { $_ eq $file } readdir(DIR)
unlink() succeeds but the file can
be seen yet with readdir(), even though it is gone when
the script ends or when the file is closed.
To Sébastien, it does not feel like Unix or Windows.
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes quoted perlport: "Don't
unlink or rename an open file" for portable code.
Some discussion ensued with Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes unveiling
the relevant
Perl source code and Yves Orton explaining oddities
in Win32 API. Very instructive and scary.
http://xrl.us/h9ay
AIX Woes David Favor had some trouble building blead on AIX. Rafael Garcia-Suarez pointed it was probably due to the Makefile failing to use makedef.pl to generate perl.exp where that matters. And then it worked.
http://xrl.us/h9az
EBCDIC, Unicode, unpack
Sadahiro Tomoyuki explained the results Rajarshi Das was seing
using unpack with formats 'U' and 'C' on EBCDIC platforms:
a UTF-8 versus UTF-EBCDIC issue.
http://xrl.us/h9a2
A Linux Issue
Jason Vas Dias found perl.h to incorrectly guess the IOPARM_LEN
on Linux to be constant 256 and posted a patch to use
the _IOC_SIZE as it should. Rafael tweaked the change
to avoid misterious side-effects on some other random platform
and applied it.
http://xrl.us/h9a3
The open tickets count was at 1519 in Oct 24 13:00.
Robert Spier and the Bug summary
http://xrl.us/h2ze
Perl RT just now
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
Exit Code in 5.8.8? Nicholas Clark, after seeing a lot of patching in exit code, asked whether it just had to do with VMS or if it affects Unix and Windows sides. He wondered about the convenience of integrating this to maint now or in a couple of months. No answer so far.
http://xrl.us/h9a4
Revisited cc/cppsymbols
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes posted a patch to fix
a long-standing bug on Configure's test for cppsymbols
with values which contain spaces, such as Cygwin's
_LONG_DOUBLE=long double.
http://xrl.us/h9a5
mv-if-diff Days are Counted Rafael Garcia-Suarez posted a patch to remove mv-if-diff from the main makefile and asked for people to try it. Nicholas did and found the need for a tweak.
The "remove mv-if-diff" campaign summarized
http://xrl.us/h9a6
This week
http://xrl.us/h9a7
White Smokes for Compress::Zlib
Without much ado, Paul Marquess filed a fix for
the Compress::Zlib's smoke failures seen on
Win32, which was applied by H.Merijn Brand
with great expectations.
http://xrl.us/h9a8
warnings.pm Works as It Should
Rafael Garcia-Suarez dismissed bug #36781
which claimed functions enabled, warn, warnif
in warnings.pm were buggy. He explained
how the reported behavior was the intented one
according to the docs and Paul Marquess
noted it is all there in perllexwarn.pod.
http://xrl.us/h9a9
Named Escapes in Eval Peter Scott noticed an oddity when using named escapes in evals and thought a POD fix could be in order. Sadahiro Tomoyuki suggested the issue could be slightly different as well as the appropriate doc fix.
http://xrl.us/h9ba
Misleading Closures in Regexes
William L. Devanney opened RT ticket #37543 after
being surprised with how $^N worked with respect
to global and lexical variables. Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan
explained the point was the use of regex
construction ?{} which creates a closure
around the lexical environment and a known bug
that makes it refer to the first time
the regex is compiled, giving wrong results
for subsequent calls.
http://xrl.us/h9bb
perl5db.pl Fix Brendan O'Dea sent a patch for fixing an incorrect instruction in termination message emitted by perl5db.pl.
http://xrl.us/h9bc
Free the Tries
Jarkko Hietaniemi spotted and patched a bug in regcomp.c that prevented
tries to be freed.
http://xrl.us/h9bd
ExtUtils::Constant and Perl 5.004 Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni
posted a small patch to restore ExtUtils::Constant compatibility
with Perl 5.004.
http://xrl.us/h9be
This summary was written by Adriano Ferreira. I would like to acknowledge a mistake and apologize myself to H.Merijn Brand for spelling wrong his name in the last summaries. Please correct me and send comments.
Information concerning bugs referenced in this summary (as #nnnnn) may be viewed at http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=nnnnn
Information concerning patches to maint or blead referenced in this summary (as #nnnnn) may be viewed at http://public.activestate.com/cgi-bin/perlbrowse?patch=nnnnn
Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, (subscription: perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org ). The archive is at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/ .
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