"Kindly avoid inflicting upon this one the same fate shared by so much other documentation produced by a patchwork of well-meaning but disparate contributors seeing more the trees than the forest as they continually apply peephole optimizations that inadvertently compromise the overall integrity of the work, where the presentation eventually more resembles an illegible patchwork quilt of no especial application or intended purpose than it does a dedicated garment of one cloth woven." -- Tom Christiansen, at the height of his form.
Gabor Szabo continued his quest to add examples to the core
documentation, based on feedback he had received giving training
lessons. First up, he wanted to rewrite perlfunc to use the
modern approach for opening files (using lexical file handles and
the three argument form).
While no-one could dispute that this was a good idea, Nicholas objected to the fact that it meant that new stuff was being added but no old stuff was being pruned away.
Other changes that Gabor wished to make involved adding more examples to the documentation. Again, Nicholas wondered why people wouldn't have the reflex to toss off a few one-liners to see how things worked.
H.Merijn Brand suggested creating an examples directory. Gabor
liked the idea, but regretted that the usual installer tools
(CPAN and CPANPLUS) do not install the eg/ directories,
making them all but invisible to mere mortals.
Opening gambit http://xrl.us/o7qy
Gabor then continued with examples for index/rindex. Given
that the debate about open was not resolved, this was not applied.
http://xrl.us/o7qz
He then added a brief discussion of use strict in perlintro
and replaced the use of $a and $b by some less-special
variables. H.Merijn liked it enough to apply it.
http://xrl.us/o7q2
perlintro also received another two batches of changes, here:
http://xrl.us/o7q3
and here:
http://xrl.us/o7q4
Gabor was briefly confused as to whether he should be patching
blead or maint. H.Merijn Brand and Yves Orton explained that
he should patch blead, and that the maint pumpking (currently
Nicholas Clark, but will be Dave Mitchell in the future) will backport
patches to maint as appropriate.
http://xrl.us/o7q5
So Gabor patched perlhack in order to point future porters to the
right thing to hack.
X marks the spot http://xrl.us/o7q6
Gabor then gave perlopentut.pod a work-over to begin recommending the use of lexical file handles rather than typeglobs. H.Merijn Brand had a number of issues with the proposed changes, and the thread continued on for quite some time. People seemed to be in agreement that some sort of improvement was needed, but the hard question was what was truly essential for a tutorial, and in what order to present it.
Opening night http://xrl.us/o7q7
After digesting the suggestions that everyone put forward, Gabor
produced a second cut. After an initial false start, Tom Christiansen
explained that from a tutorial perspective, omitting parentheses
and preferring or over || is incorrect. Having taught thousands
of people Perl, Tom has come to the conclusion that parens and
low-precedence || helps people come to grips with the language.
Omitting needless parentheses comes further up the curve of Perl
mastery.
http://xrl.us/o7q8
my_strlcpy Steve Peters had tried to replace some uses of strcpy, (which
is deemed ``unsafe'' in that it can copy without limit), with the
safer my_strlcpy. Except that they don't return the same thing,
which caused Steve Hay's smoke machine to have a fit. The first
Steve was rather embarrassed and apologised.
On the plus side, this revealed a place where more tests are needed.
Copy right http://xrl.us/o7q9
Hash::Util::FieldHash versus global destruction Joshua ben Jore wanted to know whether Hash::Util::FieldHash
makes inside-out objects safe in the face of object that defines a
DESTROY method. Anno Siegel explained that everything should be
fine during the normal course of events, but wasn't too sure whether
global destruction (what happens when the interpreter is being taken
down just before the perl process expires) changes the rules so
much that this no longer holds true.
Joshua spelt out some of the potential problem scenarios he envisaged, and how best to deal with them. Anno thought that the proposed work-arounds were all rather bletcherous, and promised to think about it to see whether he could come up with a good solution.
The underlying problem is that inside-out objects reveal an aspect of global destruction that was never apparent before, and if you're really unlucky, it could bite your code.
Unintended consequences http://xrl.us/o7ra
SvCUR and SvLEN documentation Yves Orton read the documentation concerning these two functions
and had difficulty in reconciling it with what Devel::Peek was
telling him. Jan thought it made sense to him, and so he wondered
what it was that Yves didn't understand. There ensued a long
conversation between Jan and Yves that discussed the matter in
more detail.
Yves finally understood the issue, and suggested that Jan write up some documentation to clarify the matter. Jan hoped that someone else could summarise the issue instead (who, me?) and Yves said that he would take a stab at it, and allow Jan to make fun of it until it all made sense.
String theory http://xrl.us/o7rb
Responding to the itchy thread from last week, David Muir Sharnoff
explained that his number one gripe with the core was its less than
complete support for tied arrays, magic on tied variables, and the
lack of a GETREF method for ties. All of which would no doubt
make his life easier.
Not to mention closing a bug or two http://xrl.us/o7rc
David Nicol proposed adding a 'once' statement modifier, that, after having been executed, would then delve into the optree and excise the statement out of the optree by rethreading the prior opcode to the next opcode.
Rafael agreed that Perl 6 has a similar construct, but that there
were no plans to add it to 5.10. He was happy that state variables
resolved the ugly my $x if 0 hack, and thought that UNITCHECK,
from the perltodo list was more worthy of burning up some tuits.
COBOL has an ALTER verb, after all http://xrl.us/o7rd
This is an optimisation in the regular expression engine that, as far as Dave Mitchell can tell, is never exercised by the test suite, and, try as he might, was unable to concoct any example that could. So after talking things over with Hugo van der Sanden, he decided to fire up the chain-saw.
So if your fancy patterns now starting taking longer than the scheduled moment of the heat death of the universe, you know who to blame. Hugo had hoped that some sort of instrumentation under a debugging build might be added to the engine to allow the measurements of different optimisation strategies. Dave wasn't planning to, although he figured it would probably be doable, even if he didn't know right now what shape or form it would take.
Look for a patch tomorrow morning http://xrl.us/o7re
threads Artur Bergman, one of the original authors of the threads module,
discovered all the work that had been done recently, and objected
to the change that allowed exit to end a thread silently (and
not the entire process), saying that it blurred the distinction
between threads and processes.
He also spotted a section in the code that dealt with passing signals to threads, noting that it was not thread-safe. Jerry wasn't sure whether this was a true, and asked for a patch to help him understand the situation.
Jerry D. Hedden regretted that some of the design decisions that Artur mentioned, as a way of explaining why things were the way they were, were not mentioned in the documentation.
Jan defended the design decision to allow a nested function to terminate the thread, and not have to percolate the desire back up the call stack to the main thread function.
Liz Mattijsen voiced the opinion that it was important for a thread
encountering some naughty library code, that contained evil exit
somewhere, to not be able to take out the whole application.
Artur explained that a technique already existed for dealing with this situation.
Picking up the thread http://xrl.us/o7rf
Jerry D. Hedden was sufficiently worried by Artur's claim that the signal dispatching code was not safe, that he broke the discussion out into a separate thread. He stated that as far as he could see, the code was thread-safe. Jan Dubois confirmed that he was certain that it was fine, as well.
Artur described the problem he envisaged in more detail, which allowed Jan to point out where the argument was flawed, since the code already took the situation Artur outlined into account.
And so now Artur owes Jan a beer.
Nicholas Clark pointed out that even though the above code is race-safe on a single-processor box, on an SMP machine it might be possible to have a race, and he showed where it could happen. The jury is still out on this matter.
http://xrl.us/o7rg
Storable.pm has poor version compatibility Kari Pahula was shuffling binary images between two computers using
RPC::PlServer and RPC::PlClient, with Storable acting as a
serialising mechanism, and shipping the result over the wire.
Things started to fall apart when the two computers in question
were running different versions of Storable (The 2.6 receiver
versus the 2.7 sender), which rendered the received data essentially
worthless. Kari wished that Storable had a mechanism to specify
that version N should produce a data stream compatible with
version N-x, for some small value of x. That is, Kari would
quite happy to go back to his 2.7 server, and explicitly add a
make this 2.6 compatible flag, except that this is currently
not possible.
http://xrl.us/o7rh
I18N::Langinfo and POSIX Last week, Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni wrote some tests to improve the coverage of these two modules. In doing so, he discovered a couple of bugs: fields documented as existing, in fact, don't. Steve Peters had problems with some of the test results, and applied a partial patch. Craig Berry looked at some of the skipped tests this week, and made a few more changes.
http://xrl.us/o7ri
Here are the changes, concerning missing POSIX functionality, that Craig realised was being dealt with appropriately.
http://xrl.us/o7rj
Sébastien came back later on with a way to improve
POSIX::localeconv()'s usefulness, by defining all keys in the
underlying hash, and making the undefined ones point to an empty
string. This would make the test suite easier to manage, and would
lead to less make-work code being required in client code.
http://xrl.us/o7rk
perlhack: reflections on portability Jarkko Hietaniemi is undergoing therapy to recover from doing combat for far too long with C compilers that conspire to make the perl codebase such a fun place to hang out.
The tao of portability http://xrl.us/o7rm
And another batch of things to watch out for.
http://xrl.us/o7rn
Jarkko then started picking away at the z/OS patches that had
recently been sent to the list from IBM, to see what he could
salvage. First up was some low-hanging fruit in the shape of
hints/os390.sh and Makefile.SH.
http://xrl.us/o7ro
And then a number of EBCDIC fixes in the test suite.
http://xrl.us/o7rp
He carried on with some more library files and test. Stephen McCamant wondered whether there wasn't an elegant way to factorise the EBCDIC/ASCII differences so that less code wound up being duplicated.
http://xrl.us/o7rq
And something to do with main that H.Merijn was unable to apply,
despite his best intentions.
http://xrl.us/o7rr
Taking that, and Stephen's, remarks into account, Jarkko brewed a fresh patch.
http://xrl.us/o7rs
At the end of the week, Jarkko was able to tease out a fix for
MIME::Base64's quoted-print.t test. He wasn't precisely sure
how EBCDIC and quoted-printable are supposed to work together
at the best of times, but sent the patch on its way.
=E8=96=A4@=94=81=A8@=98=A4=96=A3=85@=94=85@=96=95@=A3=88=81=A3= http://xrl.us/o7rt
Jarkko discovered with delight that recent versions of gcc have a
-std to specify to which C standard the source code should be held
against. So he taught cflags.SH to specify that C89 is the only
game in town.
// is not a comment http://xrl.us/o7ru
And in the interest of perfection, Jarkko also ensured that a number of recent additions to the code base were cited in cflags.SH.
http://xrl.us/o7rv
In a grab-bag of assorted fixes, Jarkko patched dump.c, pp_sys.c,
sv.c and util.c and snuck in a few more additions to perlhack.
http://xrl.us/o7rw
In a last glorious attack on perlhack, Jarkko wrote about the
Configure -Dgccansipedantic switch, that forces the gcc compiler
to become extremely fussy about what it considers acceptable
practices in code.
Squeaky clean http://xrl.us/o7rx
Yves Orton landed a fairly hefty patch of tweakery, in part to improve the escaping code, making it Unicode aware. The second part was to clean up the way debugging output is displayed by the regexp engine. The latter work was not yet complete, but Yves felt it was time to commit.
Dave Mitchell applied the changes, and noted a number of compiler
warnings about char */U8 differences, and mentioned that the
debug output is currently a bit of mess, and the direction in which
he wished to push it.
Yves explained what he was tinkering with at the moment, and asked for guidance on dealing with the variables used in the code. He thought that the de-recursion work that Dave had put into the engine offered a suitable place for squirrelling away new variables, and thought that the current way of dealing with variables was weird.
Dave Mitchell explained that the current state of affairs can be traced back to the heritage of Henry Spencer's original regular expression library, twisted beyond belief to work in a multi-interpreter, multi-threaded environment.
*sounds of hammers, saws and arc-welders in the basement* http://xrl.us/o7ry
Yves fixed up a number of warnings that the new code issued, in a subsequent patch.
http://xrl.us/o7rz
FAIL(F) linux 2.6.12-9-powerpc [debian] (ppc/1 cpu) This failure, Rafael Garcia-Suarez believed, was due to the recent work performed on dump.c whose aim was to improve the output by escaping ``invisible'' characters. Yves promised to take a look (which happened just above).
http://xrl.us/o7r2
perlPod::Text::Overstrike (#7959) Whatever the problem was, at some point in the past four years, Steve Peters discovered that it had been fixed.
Counterstrike http://xrl.us/o7r3
localtime(3) calls tzset(3), but localtime_r(3) may not. (#26136) Jason Vas Dias posted an patch to fix a bug for Perl on Fedora,
following on from a revival of the patch by Benjamin Holzman.
Benjamin followed up on Jason's work and tweaked the patch to make
it suitable for both maint and blead.
It's about time http://xrl.us/o7r4
defined-ness of substrings disappear over repeated calls (#39247) A few words of wisdom from Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes on the matter of XS code dealing with magic.
http://xrl.us/o7r5
%ENV is very large (#39547) Steve Hay traced this problem down to the way perl gets compiled on the Win32 platform and thought that as things stand, the restriction appears to be an intrinsic limitation of the platform, and doubted it could be solved.
Randy W. Sims forwarded the message to Microsoft, who confirmed that the environment block for a process is indeed limited to just shy of 32 kilobytes.
Their bug, not ours http://xrl.us/o7r6
__attribute__((unused)) (#39634) Andy Dougherty tweaked the setting of the HAS_ATTRIBUTE define in
a way that he felt was the clearest to understand. Rafael applied it.
http://xrl.us/o7r7
Steve Hay wrote some more C code to analyse this problem and found
that indeed, the -r operator returns false for STDIN. Trying
it out with various C compilers led him to conclude that this is
also some sort of Win32 limitation. Steve and Yves kicked around a
few ideas, but at the end of the week it looks like it will wind up
documented in perlport as something that doesn't work.
The tailor's face and hands http://xrl.us/o7r8
S_regmatch produces a stack overflow (#39774) A pattern that results in a stack overflow was reported. Steve Peters
explained that in blead, the overflow no longer exists, although an
error message described another sort of exhaustion is emitted instead.
Yves Orton explained how the pattern was one of the sort that tend to give NFAs such as perl's regexp engine fits, as it forces backtracking information to be stashed away at every single point in the string. He went on to show how the pattern could be rewritten in a much more efficient manner.
He then expressed hope that some day, the optimiser might be able to compose the transform all by itself, but reasoned that it might be difficult.
When he says it's not easy http://xrl.us/o7r9
pod2usage(-verbose => 0) and pod2usage(-verbose => 1) (#39775) David Christensen wanted to know what the status was on a patch that fixes
a problem with pod2usage.
http://xrl.us/o7sa
Switch module bug (#39789) Artyom Tseitlin, poor chap, was bitten by too-clever-by-half magic
of Text::Balanced (upon which Switch relies). Adriano Ferreira
posted a semi-evil hack that would allow Artyom to continue to use
Switch.
Divide and conquer http://xrl.us/o7sb
-Duseshrplib (#39797) Philippe Schaffnit was going mad trying to discover what his mistake was in trying to build Perl on Irix. (no, using Irix is not an acceptable answer). The problem sounded familiar to Andy Dougherty, who suggested an approach to narrow things down. At the end of the week we still had not heard back from Philippe.
http://xrl.us/o7sc
%$_) passed as args (#39800) Vaclav Ovsik ran afoul of the absence of refcounting to @_ and the
perl stack.
Don't do that then http://xrl.us/o7sd
bleadperl -Dm -e1 segfaults on win32 (#39806) Rafael made an educated guess that a thread was trying to print something using a data structure that had already been freed...
http://xrl.us/o7se
eval and hash access in subroutine (#39816) Thomas Ziehmer composed a clever little ditty that shows how he was
forced to make a bogus %hash = %hash assignment to make things
work correctly. I shall have commented on this next week, since
nobody did this week.
Which was last week, anyway http://xrl.us/o7sf
PERL5SHELL is not checked for tainted data (#39832) Paul Fenwick showed how an evil hacker could make Perl inadvertently
launch Notepad through a system call, even in taint mode, since
PERL5SHELL is not subject to the usual tainting strictures.
Rafael took a stab at closing the hole, and asked for someone with
access to a Windows machine to validate the fix. Yves confirmed that
the problem was indeed resolved. Dr. Ruud suggested applying
similar checks upon $ENV{SystemRoot} and $ENV{windir}.
Rafael wanted to know what purpose those two variables served.
Could have been worse http://xrl.us/o7sg
accept() (#39835) Andy Wardley discovered that the introduction of Safe Signals, from
5.7.3 onwards had rendered the TCP server examples in perlipc
obsolete. So he updated the POD, in the hope that some kind soul
would apply it to blead (and even maint) so that others may
avoid running into the same problem.
http://xrl.us/o7sh
Erland Sommarskog discovered that nested threads don't.
http://xrl.us/o7si
Rafael Garcia-Suarez noticed that a Data::Bind compilation failure
could be fixed by diddling with how Carp was used, and therefore
wondered if something hadn't been broken somewhere. The symptoms reminded
David Landgren that he had encountered similar problems testing modules
under blead.
http://xrl.us/o7sj
An internal server error prevented the bug summary from being posted this week, but I assume we are somewhere around 1500.
Check 'em out http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
Term::ANSIColor version 1.11 released by Russ Allbery. Essentially a
documentation and test suite enhancements release.
http://xrl.us/o7sk
Test::Builder/More/Simple version 0.64 was rushed to the delivery
room in an emergency by Michael Schwern. A change in 0.63 to
test_fail() broke Test::Exception (and possibly many more
modules as well).
Author and module are in good health http://xrl.us/o7sm
Marcus Holland-Moritz commented on the state variables progress,
saying that if the making iffy constructs results in a slowdown in the
general case, then those constructs should simply be outlawed as errors.
But the slowdown is only wafer thin http://xrl.us/o7sn
David Nicol suggested that INIT blocks could be used to initialise
state variables, and proposed a suitable error message to be used
when indicating that a state variable was not going to be initialised
as expected.
http://xrl.us/o7so
Ron Savage followed up on the followup from Jan Dubois regarding
Oracle on ActiveState, noting that he was able to install
DBD::Oracle , but unable to do anything with it. Jan suggested
a few things to try out, and outlined what ActiveState would have
to do to get it to work in all cases.
http://xrl.us/o7sp
Steve Hay noted that a recent version of ext/threads doesn't
build with Borland on Win32, due to differences in header files.
Jerry D. Hedden found an appropriate #define upon which to hang
the missing definitions.
http://xrl.us/o7sq
And Jerry delivered the patch, applied by Rafael.
http://xrl.us/o7sr
He then bumped up the version with a fix to stop signalling terminated threads from dumping core.
http://xrl.us/o7ss
Dr. Ruud wondered whether it was worth chasing down 0 and replacing
it with NULL , in pp.c to begin with.
http://xrl.us/o7st
statefulness is a property of the code, not the variable, sayeth Dave Mitchell.
http://xrl.us/o7su
Steve Hay encountered a strange problem with perly.h on Win32, that he
traced tentatively back to the switch-over from byacc to bison. A tweak
to regen_perly.pl fixed the problem. So Steve applied the fix, but regretted
not being able to understand why the error was occurring.
Action and reaction http://xrl.us/o7sv
Jarkko tweaked hv.c and sv.c for -DPERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT_PRIVATE and
expressed disgust at the very existence of a global variable named
done_sanity_check. After having stepped back to look at his handiwork, he
realised that recent work to bring DynaLoader.o into libperl has
rendered the Symbian port of Perl unusable.
http://xrl.us/o7sw
Steve Hay discovered that mod_perl 1.x and apache 1.x do not like
blead , possibly due to the way constants have been rejigged.
http://xrl.us/o7sx
Sadahiro Tomoyuki produced a patch to update comments in
scan_const , since much of it remains as it did at change #780
in the repository, which, if the records are correct, is roughly
about the same time that the porters stopped using punched cards.
http://xrl.us/o7sy
He also edited perlop to clarify the parsing of quoted constructs,
so that people could apply some scientific method rather than just
guessing to see how things behaved.
http://xrl.us/o7sz
Yves Orton silenced a system warning during tests, although
was only able to do so for Win32, although he thought that it
should be possible to tweak it to work in a cross-platform manner.
http://xrl.us/o7s3
This summary was written by David Landgren.
Last week's summary, here:
http://xrl.us/o7s4
elicited a response from H.Merijn who was concerned with some smoke tests throwing out black smoke that was not reproducible with a test run by hand.
Yves Orton also mentioned that he had a documentation patch for the heredoc/escaping muddle that was in limbo, and was wondering whether it needed improvement or was just pushed down on the stack of things to apply.
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/
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.
If you found this summary useful, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.