"Most version control systems have flexible commit hooks to automatically perform actions" -- Michael G Schwern
"Obi Wan Perforce: This isn't the version control system you were looking for. Move along, move along..." -- John Peacock
Gabor Szabo wanted to know if the dual-lifing of core modules on CPAN was still on the agenda, and if so, was there a list of suitable candidates, and/or modules that should never become dual-lifed. Rafael Garcia-Suarez said that the process was done on an as-needed basis.
Dual-lifing is when a module is bundled with the core distribution,
but also available separately on CPAN. For instance, Time::HiRes,
a module that for a long time was only available on CPAN, went into
core for 5.8.
It stood at version 1.48 when 5.8.0 was released, 1.66 when 5.8.3 was released, and the current version on CPAN is around 1.90. If it wasn't dual-lifed, you would have to wait until a new version of Perl came out to get the upgrade. As it is, any of those versions of perl can be upgraded to use the current version of Time::HiRes from CPAN, with all the attendant bug fixes and improvements that the maintainer has made to it over the past four years.
Dual-lifing the core modules, then, is simply giving this same flexibility to modules that only come with the perl distribution, and do not have a distinct distribution on CPAN.
Michael Schwern explained a couple of the tricks needed to test
core modules, said that back-porting the module to earlier perls
would be a bonus, and suggested Exporter and Class::Struct
as two possible immediate candidates.
Moving out today http://xrl.us/rqwb
Exporter So Adriano Ferreira took Schwern's suggestion seriously and
set about dual-lifing the venerable Exporter module. Andy
Lester noticed this, and wondered what scratch it itched.
Michael explained that he thought cleaning up cruftiness was a good
enough reason. Giving people the chance of upgrading just Exporter
in order to take advantage of some new feature was a Good Thing,
especially if this would otherwise mean upgrading to the latest
version of Perl.
After this was explained to Andy, he wholeheartedly agreed, and suggested that Adriano hook up with Ricardo Signes, who apparently has a number of ideas on the subject.
Following that, H.Merijn Brand played devil's advocate and explained what was bad about the idea. The porters decided that the current method of doing things should be able to handle the points H.Merijn raised.
Exporting Exporter http://xrl.us/rqwc
David Wheeler was writing a mini-language in Perl, but discovered
that the lazy evaluation semantics of or makes life complicated
when you try and overload it. Fergal Daly mentioned Tangram's
trick of co-opting & and |, which works for most people
most of the time.
Joshua ben Jore thought that this approach would be less pain
than grovelling around in B:: space to deparse the op-tree
(which David had mooted as a possible approach).
chromatic mentioned that it is within the realms of the feasible (and a little XS code) to override any op in the op-tree. Mark-Jason Dominus suggested David get in touch with Audrey Tang, who does this sort of mind-bending syntax overloading all the time.
Covert operations http://xrl.us/rqwd
Jim Cromie posted a 90KB patch to combine the op_next and
op_sibling fields into a union, which could shave up to a fifth
of the size off the the total of a full op-tree. This might provide
a benefit to mod_perl-like environments (and hey! it might improve
L2 cache behaviour).
As things stand, it nearly all works, and Jim asked for clarification on a couple of points. After three days of deafening silence, Leon Brocard wondered out loud whether the added complexity was worth it.
Now with less fat http://xrl.us/rqwe
chromatic landed a rather large documentation patch. The idea was
to replace all indirect constructor calls (my $f = new Foo) by
direct calls (my $f = Foo->new), the reason being that the
documentation should encourage unambiguous and reliable programming
practices.
Surprisingly enough, the patch elicited next to no comment (chromatic and I discussed this at YAPC::Europe last week, imagining that it would cause a meltdown on the list). Rafael applied it.
http://xrl.us/rqwf
He then did the same in lib/*, but ran into problems with
IO::Compress and File::Temp (at least), since they are both
dual-lifed. This will require a lot more coordination with
the various distribution maintainers and thus may fall within the
realms of fiddling with the bloody grammar[tm].
http://xrl.us/rqwg
FETCH_*_ATTRIBUTES Jerry D. Hedden was astonished to find a glaring seven year old documentation error in attributes.pm. Which may mean that either no-one uses them or no-one reads documentation. Whatever the reason, Rafael applied Jerry's correction.
http://xrl.us/rqwh
After a false start last month, Yves Orton managed to beat his latest regular expression engine optimisation into submission.
Now, /foo[xy]+|bar[tu]*|baz+/ goes really fast. That is, fixed-string
prefixes followed by metacharacters in alternations reap the benefit
of Yves' earlier trie work, whereas before, only /foo|bar|baz/ would
have seen an improvement.
Jumping out of tries http://xrl.us/rqwi
Jarkko Hietaniemi urged all porters to fire up their clay tablets and drag out their styluses (ahem, styli), because the latest Unicode definitions now include... cuneiform.
Think of the possibilities! And to bring those dreams to reality, Jarkko provided a patch to update Perl with this information.
If it dumps core, will it shatter? http://xrl.us/rqwj
Jarkko also phoned in with the latest reports about compiling the
perl source with a C++ compiler. He had managed to get quite far
with Tru64's C++ compiler, because it is reasonably lenient about
array declarations and disambiguating delete as a keyword.
Other compilers are more problematic.
Dominic Dunlop took it for a spin on Mac OS X with g++ 4.0.1 but
ran into problems right away with Configure getting a bit
confused about compiler capabilities. He then delivered a patch
that cleared up many of the issues.
http://xrl.us/rqwk
make distclean problem (#1647) A bug opened in 1999 was fixed some time in the past seven years.
http://xrl.us/rqwm
PerlIO::scalar doesn't know how to truncate (#40241) Bo Lindbergh and Nick Ing-Simmons continued to explore the issue of
what file descriptor functionality needs to be implemented to make
PerlIO::Scalar behave as much as possible like a file handle.
-s (for file size) would be useful, and last-modified-time would
probably have to be kluged in, but chown and chmod could
probably be no-ops. And so forth.
http://xrl.us/rqwn
Math::BigInt silently drops lib argument if not available (#40242) Tels and Andreas König continued to look at this problem, and finally agreed on the right approach to take. Now all that has to happen is for Tels to implement it.
http://xrl.us/rqwo
kill( 0, ... ) does not return alive status of child process (#40262) "M" noted a discrepancy between the documentation and reality of a
kill call, to determine the status of a child. David Nicol came
up with a suitable tweak to the documentation, which was applied
by Rafael.
http://xrl.us/rqwp
bignum (#40263) Leif Pedersen encountered a strange problem with bignum, whereby
$char = ord($char) - ord('A') + 10 appeared to have no effect.
Tels twisted the example slightly, and got it to produce a
Modification of a read-only value error, which led him to conclude
that it was an aliasing error.
http://xrl.us/rqwq
xsubpp ignores PREFIX when wrapping function declared with INTERFACE (#40264) Salvador Fandiño uncovered a nasty interaction in xsubpp between
PREFIX and INTERFACE, and proposed a fix. Rafael agreed that
the change was necessary, even if it was not backwards compatible.
He suggested that the issue be raised with Ken Williams, who
maintains ExtUtils::ParseXS (since xsubpp is merely a wrapper
around that).
http://xrl.us/rqwr
PerlIO::scalar doesn't respect readonly-ness (#40267) Bo Lindbergh uncovered another beauty in PerlIO::scalar. Mike
Guy hoped that a couple of variations on the theme would be also
be fixed by whoever fixed it. Rafael fixed it with change #28798,
so let's hope it all gets bedded down in the test suite.
http://xrl.us/rqws
& in perlop example (#40272) Sebastian Schmidt suggested function call in an s///e operation
should lose its & sigil. Rafael agreed, so now it doesn't.
http://xrl.us/rqwt
s///e (#40274) Jean-Louis Leroy showed how perl goes all pear-shaped when one
tries to nest s///e operations. In perl's defence, the code
does look interestingly abstruse.
http://xrl.us/rqwu
Configure problem (#40286) Howard Shubs had a problem configuring perl on a path containing a space. Andy Dougherty came up with a crude patch to backslash-escape spaces in paths, but suspected that a number of other places may need similar treatment. Kids, this is definitely something you can try at home.
http://xrl.us/rqwv
10 more thrown onto the pile, for a total of 1531. http://xrl.us/rqww
Close one today! http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
Michael G. Schwern rolled out ExtUtils::MakeMaker version 6.30_02, as
a release candidate for 6.31. Craig A. Berry reported all green lights
on VMS.
http://xrl.us/rqwx
Michael also push Test::Builder/More/Simple version 0.64_01 out
the door. Two important changes that people should be aware of:
5.8.0 threaded builds are no longer supported (because the
implementation at the time was too buggy) and the report output has
changed. This later point will be of great importance to any module
that scrapes test output.
http://xrl.us/rqwy
One of the reasons it is worth pushing for C++-compilable sources, is that it gets us things like inlined functions, IEEE floats and other goodnesses. Things that probably exist in a current C++ compiler, but won't, if ever come to C compilers.
http://xrl.us/rqwz
Yves Orton responded to a problem of ^C segfaulting on Win32
by pointing out that ^C is weird on Win32, as some of the implementation
is in fact running in a separate thread.
http://xrl.us/rqw2
Ask Bjørn Hansen nixed the idea of security@ address for the
reporting of security vulnerabilities in perl, since past
experience has shown its purpose to be little more than a spam
magnet.
http://xrl.us/rqw3
chromatic added handy index numbering to the caller()
documentation in perlfunc. Useful stuff, applied.
http://xrl.us/rqw4
Nick Ing-Simmons gave further reasons why it was worth making the codebase compile with a C++ compiler.
http://xrl.us/rqw5
This summary was written by David Landgren. Yes, this summary covers ten days worth of traffic. You lucky people.
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