"I estimate that it would take approximately 2000 CPU years to smoke all of CPAN on a reasonable set of platforms." -- Adam Kennedy, 2000 light years from home.
[summariser's note: the week was too busy for me to spend the required time to bring the summary to a close, so here's the best I could do. Regretfully, I am unable to summarise Nicholas Clark's excellent follow-ups to the Perl 5 advocacy thread that was kicked off the week before. Interested readers are invited to dive back into the thread to chase them down.]
Once upon a time http://xrl.us/nnuy
Win32API::File into the core This was in some ways fall-out from the advocacy thread last week.
By bringing this module into core, it would ease installing CPAN
modules on the new non-ActiveState Windows-based Perl distributions
that are coming to light (that is, distributions that don't use
ActiveState's ppm installer but instead use source tarballs
directly from CPAN).
http://xrl.us/nump
Dave Mitchell reported that he reworked the TRIE regop to
work with the new state stack mechanism, thereby removing more
recursion from the regular expression engine. Yves Orton was impressed
that Dave taken Yves's code in his stride, and announced that he
was planning to introduce another regop in the future for other
kinds of tries.
Going cursive http://xrl.us/numq
Yves Orton followed up on a question Tels asked last week, about benchmarking regular expression performance
A fair fight http://xrl.us/numr
warning at exit if detached threads still running It used to be that if a thread was still running at exit time, a
warning was generated. So a patch was written to suppress it.
Jerry D. Hedden questioned the rationale, pointing out that someone,
somewhere, might find this useful sometime.
He thought that a nicer way of dealing with this would be via no warnings 'threads',
except that it doesn't work. Rafael Garcia-Suarez explained what hoops one
would have to jump through in the C source to do so. Jerry noted that the
different functions Rafael cite are not documented, and wanted to know what
the differences were between them. Rafael explained the differences, and
suggested looking through the source for a sample of uses.
A fair warning http://xrl.us/nums
exit In other threads news, Jerry also discovered how a small thread that does
nothing but exit will not call the PL_threadhook handler and wondered
what to do about it. Jan Dubois thought that the best thing to do would be
to put the thread running code in a setjmp/longjmp-style wrapper.
http://xrl.us/numt
exit from a thread http://xrl.us/numu
http://xrl.us/numv
http://xrl.us/numw
http://xrl.us/numx
Tom Horsley kicked off a thread about testing CPAN.
http://xrl.us/numy
First steps in implementing the zip64 algorithm in Perl. As there is no real reference implementation, and the specs are vague in places, Paul Marquess kicked this out the door to see whether it flies or smokes.
The 64 bit question http://xrl.us/numz
Andy Lester pulled some variables down into tighter scopes in regexec.c, in an attempt to make it easier to read and follow.
Bedtime reading http://xrl.us/num2
A sensible improvement to perlhack.pod from Dr. Ruud.
http://xrl.us/num3
A couple of smokes drew some comments.
FAIL(F) MSWin32 WinXP/.Net SP2 (x86/2 cpu) http://xrl.us/num4
FAIL(Fm) MSWin32 WinXP/.Net SP2 (x86/2 cpu) http://xrl.us/num5
eval statement exits by a signal (#38854) Dominic Dunlop followed up on this April bug with some cogent
analysis that pinned the blame on calling die() within a signal
handler, but lacked the time to dig more deeply into the problem.
http://xrl.us/num6
s//#/e) (#39365) Rafael applied bcarter's patch to fix this problem, and added a regression test to make sure it never comes back.
http://xrl.us/num7
DBI module (very Urgent) (#39527) Dominic and Yves went the extra mile to help solve this problem, even though it had nothing to do with p5p's charter.
http://xrl.us/num8
*** glibc detected *** free(): invalid pointer from Perl_mg_free (#39528) Chris at financial was having a problem (like a segfault) with the
CentOS packages of apache, mod_perl and perl and asked
for help. Nicholas regretted to announce that he didn't have the
faintest idea what was happening, and suggested either trying to
reproduce the problem using only core modules, or asking CentOS
for support.
http://xrl.us/num9
printf: bad formatting of hexadecimal conversion of binary string using vector flag (#39530) Sadahiro Tomoyuki and Dominic Dunlop raced each other to see who could develop
the best patch for this bug in the shortest possible time (some issue with
formatting v-strings). In the process, it appears that Ravi S. Kadali from
IBM is able to run smoke tests against blead on the z/OS platform. This
will do wonders for smoking out EBCDIC oddities.
http://xrl.us/nuna
Keith Doyle found that multiple threads that backtick or popen kids will hang at random, which is admittedly less than ideal. Unfortunately he received no feedback on the issue.
http://xrl.us/nunb
make test fails with getppid in a Solaris 10 zone (#39536) Jie Gao discovered a problem with op/getppid.t on maint. Dominic
thought that the test from blead, which has been rewritten, would
possibly do the tricked and asked Jie Gao to take it for a spin, to see
if it resolved the failure.
http://xrl.us/nunc
%ENV is very large (#39547) Alex Keim had a problem on the Win32 platform with environments approaching or exceeding 32K in size. Steve Hay was able to reproduce the problem and found that it only manifested itself in threaded builds. Jan Dubois and Dr. Ruud suggested some other workarounds (basically, use a file, memory-mapped or otherwise, rather than the environment to pass large slabs of data to kids).
Alex still found that an environment that gave cmd (the Win32
shell) no trouble caused Perl grief, pointing to a problem with
perl's environment handling.
http://xrl.us/nund
Text::Wrap: ``This shouldn't happen'' happens (#39548) A ``cannot happen'' bug in Text::Wrap surfaced with this bug
report. Dominic chose to punt the issue for a while, to see
what the current maintainer of the module had to say.
http://xrl.us/nune
Laurent had a strange problem with a tarball for perl 5.8.8 that seemed to be lacking a couple of example files, according to the manifest. Dominic offered what advice he could.
http://xrl.us/nunf
Erik R. Ogan discovered that 5.8.8 would fail to match a string
that ought to have 32767 characters matched by (.*?).
Funny about that http://xrl.us/nung
make test in perl-5.8.8 (#39613) Ravi kumar Ravi had some problems with protocol name resolution causing a handful of tests to failed. No followups.
http://xrl.us/nunh
PerlProc_setjmp undefined under WIN32 (#39614) Jerry D. Hedden's latest patch to the threads library makes use
of a few functions (dJMPENV, JMPENV_PUSH and JMPENV_POP)
that are not available when compiling ActiveState Perl from
source.
http://xrl.us/nuni
+ 5 - 2 = 1493 http://xrl.us/nunj
The List http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
Sys-Syslog version 0.16 uploaded by Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni,
and Rafael updated blead with this version.
http://xrl.us/nunk
This in turn allowed Sébastien to close a couple of old bugs:
#20557 http://xrl.us/nunm
#35406 http://xrl.us/nunn
CPANPLUS version 0.072 was uploaded to CPAN by Jos Boumans. No, it's
not core, but may be one day. The fact that overall RAM usage has declined
in this release (as per the release notes) is certainly a welcome step
in this direction.
http://xrl.us/nuno
A sleeker Devel::PPPort version 3.08_06 was integrated into
blead by Marcus Holland-Moritz. He shrunk the size of the tarball
significantly, by generating PPPort.pm and PPPort.xs on the
fly during the build. On the other hand, this cause Configure
to come to grief, since as it didn't see a PPPort.xs at the
beginning, it went ahead and built the non-XS version.
http://xrl.us/nunp
Philippe M. Chiasson tracked down and reinstated the missing files from the APC archive.
Full recovery http://xrl.us/nunq
Nicholas Clark thought of a way of sidestepping the bogosity
introduced by the Intel icc compiler pretending to be gcc .
Almost but not quite more than we deserve http://xrl.us/nunr
Tom Christiansen wrote about the legibility myth and it sparked off an interesting discussion about typography and the written word.
¡hola! http://xrl.us/nuns
Tom also continued with a discussion of parenthetical perils.
http://xrl.us/nunt
Dr Ruud cooked up a tiny patch for toke.c to fix isALNUM(*s) && *s != '_' .
http://xrl.us/nunu
Paul Marquess solved a problem in make test with multiple Makefile.PLs.
Need to know http://xrl.us/nunv
Paul also wondered why -r and -w don't work as expected when applied
to \*STDIN and \*STDOUT on Win32.
http://xrl.us/nunw
David Landgren ran a smoke at one point last week and reported a few failures in the maint snapshot. Hmm, maybe after I get the summary out the door I'll go and see what's happening with it now.
http://xrl.us/nunx
John E. Malmberg wanted to know if the rsync server was stuck at
blead@28402 .
http://xrl.us/nuny
Feel free to follow the links if the subject grabs your attention.
http://xrl.us/nunz
http://xrl.us/nun2
Configure -Aprepend http://xrl.us/nun3
http://xrl.us/nun4
Devel::PPPort broken in latest blead on Win32 http://xrl.us/nun5
MEM_WRAP_CHECK has bogus logic on HP/UX http://xrl.us/nun6
lock() scope http://xrl.us/nun7
This summary was written by David Landgren. The paragraph reformatter
fmt(1) that comes with my OS is not 8-bit clean, and it ate the
``é'' in Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni name in the previous summary. My
apologies to Sébastien. I hear there's a text processing language
that is good at doing this sort of stuff...
If you want a bookmarklet approach to viewing bugs and change reports, there are a couple of bookmarklets that you might find useful on my page of Perl stuff:
http://www.landgren.net/perl/
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