The crackdown. A number of bugs were fixed this week, possibly obsolete code was scrutinised, Hugo patched the regexp engine and Perl on Windows was improved.
h2ph finds gcc's include directory Brendan O'Dea posted a patch to use the gcc command line switch
--print-libgcc-file-name to locate the gcc include directory.
The previous technique of parsing gcc -v no longer works on
version 4.
H.Merijn Brand wanted to know when --print-libgcc-file-name was
introduced (otherwise things would start failing for older gcc
compilers). Brendan said that he had reached as far back as 2.95,
and the switch was supported. Abe Timmerman chipped in with a
justifiably ancient 2.7.2.2 gcc compiler that also
supported the switch.
Jason Vas Dias pointed to bug #37582 that he had filed on the issue, and that the patch had been applied by Steve Peters as change #26074.
Brendan's patch http://xrl.us/iiau
Jason's patch https://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=37582
Jim Cromie issued a reworked, tested on threaded and unthreaded, patch to remove the fifteen different type-specific arenaroots, and asked people to have a smoke. Nicholas Clark went over the patch very carefully and made a number of suggestions, and Jim proposed a revision of the patch, which Nicholas applied as #26139.
After looking at Nicholas's reworking of the patch, Jim added a number of corrections to the comments in the code, and then posted a series of benchmark results showing that the patch should have made things go faster (with the usual proviso about statistics).
Later in the week, Jim came back with another patch that gathered the arenas into a linked list. This has some upsides and some downsides, but notably, it allows the possibility of exposing the arena to allow performance tuning.
The elimination http://xrl.us/iiav
Benchmark results http://xrl.us/iiaw
RFC - linked list of arenas http://xrl.us/iiax
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes asked whether change #22807, which makes
$^O !~ /xxx/ emit the warning Useless use of negative pattern
binding (!~ in void context) instead of Useless use of not in
void context should be applied to maint. Nicholas yelped in pain
and whispered something about perl 5.10. Yitzchak sympathised, and
went through his own blead patches, evaluating which ones were
worthy (safe enough) to be applied to maint.
The question http://xrl.us/iiay
Yitzchak's list http://xrl.us/iiaz
h2xs and backwards compatibility Steven Schubiger voiced his disquiet over the way h2xs ties the Perl version of the module to the module of perl installed on the author's machine (even when it might run perfectly well on any number of prior versions).
Rafael Garcia-Suarez agreed that the orginal design decisions was
probably incorrect and Nicholas remembered a previous thread on the matter,
which Steven tracked down. Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni
was annoyed by modules that failed to install on 5.8.5 because
they required 5.8.7, and wondered if it wouldn't be better to
focus on the branch version (that is, 5.8), rather than relying
on the subversion (the x in 5.8.x), and offered a patch. And also
pointed out that XSLoader is backwards-compatible as far back
as 5.005_04.
Rafael declined to pick up the patch, pointing out that there is no way of ensuring that code that runs on 5.8.x will run on 5.8.x-1 and lower.
This latter point prompted David Nicol to ask whether any documentation existed relating feature to version, and when the feature moved from absent, to experimental, to robust.
Doubts over h2xs http://xrl.us/iia2
2001, a Perl odyssey http://xrl.us/iia3
Abigail posted some code where it was expected that
'A B' =~ /^(.)\s+.$(?(1))/ should match. In 5.005 it
used to work, but from 5.6.0 and beyond it fails.
Andreas König tried to track down the patch that
caused the change in behaviour, but gcc got in the way.
In fact, depending on whether he used version 3.2.3 or
4.0.3 the pattern matched, or didn't, respectively.
Hugo van der Sanden burnt a precious tuit or two and
rummaged around in the regexp engine internals and
made a one-line change that fixed the problem, but
said that he didn't have time to study the ramifications
implied by the patch and noted that "intuit_start is
probably the least maintainable piece of code in perl".
Now why would you want to do a thing like that? http://xrl.us/iia4
One of Steve Hay's boxes phoned home with a smoke failure.
After first ignoring it and hoping it would just go away
of its own accord, Steve had a closer look and noticed that
it was a real bug, and only occurred when PERL_IMPLICIT_SYS
was defined. Unfortunately, this particular #define is needed
by ActivePerl, and Steve tracked the change in behaviour
down to patch #26108. A three line change to tweak stacks
in BEGIN blocks.
Nicholas shrunk the problem down to a neat
#!./perl -w
BEGIN {
$SIG{INT} = sub {exit(0)};
kill 'INT', $$;
}
which causes a little known routine named S_unwind_handler_stack
to blow up. After a certain amount of detective work, he was able
to show quite clearly why the code was failing, but was at a
loss as to how to fix it.
Steve Hay pointed to a thread from last year where Jan Dubois posted a patch that seemed promising at the time, but for whatever reason was never polished and applied to blead.
Jan spoke up and offered a bit more detail about how the patch worked, and what it needed in order to be complete. The next day he came back with a much better version. Stever Peters applied it and all the tests passed. Yay Jan!
Smoke issues forth http://xrl.us/iia5
The offending patch http://public.activestate.com/cgi-bin/perlbrowse?patch=26108
"free to wrong pool", circa January 2004 http://xrl.us/iia6
STRANGE_MALLOC still useful? Nicholas wondered about the different code paths taken depending
on whether STRANGE_MALLOC is defined. He wondered whether it
would be safe to assume that malloc/realloc/free work
correctly these days, and that by chainsawing it out we would
escape some no-longer-needed complexity?
Andy Dougherty supplied a valuable history lesson, explaining why things came to be the way they are. And concurring that at this point in time, it could possibly get the axe, but it would be important to try out a couple of big applications to see how they fare.
Compare the simple code path to the complex code path http://xrl.us/iia7
Sarathy's 1995 summary of the problem http://xrl.us/iia8
David Hillman crafted a detailed bug report concerning errors being reported on the wrong line (which of course tends to drive people insane when they try debugging it).
Dave Mitchell, noting the relative frequency with which these sorts of bug reports tend to appear, wondering what the cost benefit ratio would be of using up more memory per op in order to keep accurate track of the current line.
Jim Cromie came up with what he termed a rather ugly solution to the matter. Then again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Dave Mitchell followed up with some preliminary numbers on the memory cost. The concensus is that a certain amount of memory could be traded for the peace of mind it would bring.
The bug report http://xrl.us/iia9
An ugly fix http://xrl.us/iiba
Steve Peters tweaked hints/linux.sh to get the Sun Studio compilers for Linux up and running. The results are promising, although the patch, in Steve's own opinion, needs work.
He also used it to take a look at Jarkko Hietaniemi's valgrind
finding from last month.
The tweak http://xrl.us/iibb
Problems with sprintf() http://xrl.us/iibc
Jarkko's valgrind discovery last month http://xrl.us/iibd
The current number of open issues stands at 1508.
The bugs at the beginning of the week http://xrl.us/iibe The Bug Summary http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
abs2rel("/foo/bar", "/foo/bar") should return '.' or
something else sensible, according to Ken Williams (and not an empty
string). After asking around if anything other than File::Spec
relied on the behaviour, Ken went ahead and fixed the problem in
Path::Class.
http://xrl.us/iibf
local and thread::shared don't
mix. "dean" filed bug
#37671 showing how localising variables bound to shared variables can
cause the shared variable to become undefined. At least in version
5.8.4.
http://xrl.us/iibg
Compress::Zlib should now build nicely on Win32 environments,
now that Paul Marquess has fixed a lurking binmode bug.
http://xrl.us/iibh
Recent consting changes to the codebase had broken perlbug's
ability to grok patchlevel.h. Yitzchak filed a patch to make it
work again and threw some compatibility future-proofing into the
bargain.
http://xrl.us/iibi
Dynamically appending code to an existing file. Jos I. Boumans
wants to do this from time to time, and showed several techniques
for implementing it, however, only two methods work. Looking at
pp_require in pp_ctl.c, it looks as if the code is going
straight to the file, rather than going through a higher layer.
Jos asked if this could or should be fixed, or nailed down in the
documentation. No takers.
http://xrl.us/iibj
Another source of segmentation faults killed. Peter Dintelmann
followed on from last week and continued to nail segfaults. He noted
that executing the code snippet PerlIO::get_layers undef would
end in grief and patched universal.c to make it work correctly
(or rather, not crash). Applied by Steve Peters as #26144.
http://xrl.us/iibk
Vadim Konovalov supplied a patch make WinCE compile blead and wondered whether ./wince shouldn't be made a subdirectory of the ./win32 directory in the source tree. H.Merijn made a few remarks about the patch, basically prodding Vadim to give himself and Rainer a bit more credit in the README.
http://xrl.us/iibm
When in doubt, use brute force. "fbriere" noted a cute bug: if you require a module that dies when it is loaded, it fails the first time. But the second time, it succeeds!
http://xrl.us/iibn
Andy Lester took a preliminary run through the codebase and axed the ancient RCS commit comments in the source. (These days the codebase is managed in a Perforce repository).
http://xrl.us/iibo
This summary was written by David Landgren.
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/ . Corrections and comments are welcome.
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