If we fake times in our fake stat then fake futimes makes sense. But chown and chmod make little sense to me - only the current process can access the scalar so current UID is owner (and can't exec it).
We could accept the calls and set errno to nearest code that made sense, or perhaps just set the mode so that fake stat saw it.
Have we missed any more fd related calls? If there anything else that we can do to filehandles via perl interface that we missed?
-- Nick Ing-Simmons, discussing how to improve PerlIO::Scalar,
September 1st, 2006.
Nicholas Clark noticed a sly new technique to fiddle around with unions of structs used for dealing with contexts, which would result in some memory savings that had the added bonus of bringing the size of the structure down to 64 bytes in the ILP32 data model.
(ILP32 means that integers, longs and pointers are all 32-bit data types).
So Nicholas applied the change, and then stepped gingerly back from the keyboard to see what the smoke machines would make of it.
http://xrl.us/rx6a
MakeMaker developments Michael G. Schwern posted his thoughts on what needs to be done to get a new stable version out the door, as well as future directions, which includes the desire for a major rewrite of the documentation.
The list appeared to be furious agreement.
http://xrl.us/rx6b
__attribute__format__(__printf__... in BSD land Philip M. Gollucci was having great difficulty in figuring out why gcc
on FreeBSD was stumbling over an __attribute__ attribute to the
printf C declaration, and declared it to be a show-stopper for 5.10,
since it breaks mod_perl2.
http://xrl.us/rx6c
He also supplied the current crop of compiler warnings when compiling blead.
http://xrl.us/rx6d
Andy Lester wrote up a report on Klocwork, a source code analysis tool, comparing it to Coverity, another tool that does the same sort of work. Jonathon Rockway appeared interested in following up on the issues uncovered.
http://xrl.us/rx6e
Allen Smith posed a most interesting question about sorts, in
relation to genetics, whereby it may be cheap to compare (and thus
order) X and Y, and is comparing Y and Z. But comparing X and Z may
be inconveniently expensive. So he wanted to know if there was a
sort algorithm that allowed one to punt the decision (for instance,
by returning undef), and force the algorithm to use different
comparisons to arrive at a sorted order.
John P. Linderman thought that what Allen really needed was not a
relational sort, but a topological sort, and suggested taking a
look at Sort::Topological.
mu http://xrl.us/rx6f
Jarkko Hietaniemi posted his latest patchwork to get the perl
distribution comping with C++. The two remaining modules that
still cause problems are Compress::Zlib and Digest::SHA.
Part of the problem with Compress::Zlib is that it is
possibly even more widely used than Perl, and its authors are
understandably loathe to give up K&R function signatures. And
it seems the only way to have both K&R and ANSI signatures is
to use horrible #if/#else botches.
http://xrl.us/rx6g
Yves Orton taught us a little more about how he taught the regexp optimiser to make use of the information available in zero-width lookahead (and lookbehind) assertions.
http://xrl.us/rx6h
Andrew Savige and Yves continued to beat this patch into shape.
http://xrl.us/rx6i
Exporter documentation Gabor Szabo suggested adding use strict/use warnings/use base into
the documentation for Exporter. It seemed to rub a number of people
the wrong way.
http://xrl.us/rx6j
John Peacock supplied a patch to fix this problem in blead, and
promised a new version of version soon.
http://xrl.us/rx6k
-M isn't forbidden on the #! line with -x (#38488) Rafael thought that it would be difficult to resolve this problem in a sufficiently robust way, mainly because of whitespace issues on the command line.
http://xrl.us/rx6m
PL_compiling.cop_warnings changed structure in 5.8.8? (#40352) This was a false alarm that Nicholas Clark figured out was because the code in question was based an incorrect assumption about what pointer to use.
http://xrl.us/rx6n
pjm at sanger reported a problem on a Tru64 platform with a test for the parent pid not working correctly. No takers for the moment.
millions and millions of pids http://xrl.us/rx6o
for loops: only internal loop is executed (#40365) Posting a broken program to a bug-tracker...
Priceless http://xrl.us/rx6p
File::Find mishandles non-dangling symlinks (#40369) Ammon spotted a bug in File::Find's code, that has probably existed
forever, and fixed it. Steve Peters applied the change.
http://xrl.us/rx6p
h2xs enum bug in ExtUtils::Constant::WriteConstants (#40381) Aaron Dancygier hit a problem with enums created with h2xs. Steve
Peters thought that the bug had possibly been fixed since, and asked for
a test case. Aaron supplied a tarball.
Tune in next week http://xrl.us/rx6q
Tsutomu Ikegami demonstrated how to produce thread deadlocks
(threadlocks?) more or less on demand, and noted that blead was
better but not perfect. Jerry D. Hedden, having spent an inordinate
amount of time on this issue in the recent past wanted to know if
the fault was still observed when using the latest version (v1.42)
of the threads module. When he tried, everything went swimmingly.
http://xrl.us/rx6r
Alex Davies demonstrated a bug that exposed some borderline behaviour
with failing s///g matches and capture variables. Dave Mitchell
noted that the test suite didn't exercise this problem, and wasn't
even sure what the correct behaviour should be anyway.
And if Dave's not sure... http://xrl.us/rx6s
perl_destruct() leaks PL_main_cv (#40388) and perl_destruct() leaks PL_defstash (#40389) Gozer demonstrated two ways to produce leaks, but Andy Dougherty was unable
to recreate them with a fresh copy of blead, and asked Gozer to check and
see whether he still saw the same problems with that.
The dynamic duo http://xrl.us/rx6t http://xrl.us/rx6u
%SIG isn't cleared during perl_shutdown() (#40390)
Gozer also went on to show that a signal handler may still be
registered during perl_shutdown even though the data structures
for them have been freed. If a signal arrives after this has occurred,
bad things happen.
http://xrl.us/rx6v
PerlIO::encoding doesn't handle fallback modes correctly? (#40401) Steve Hay was trying to bend PerlIO::encoding to do his bidding, but
was not having much luck.
http://xrl.us/rx6w
Sakina Suliman was having trouble building the JPL interpreter.
I guess that's why we pulled it http://xrl.us/rx6x
jpl/Test failing to run (#40404) Sakina then managed to get JPL to run anyway, but then ran into grief a little further on.
The last JPL user on earth http://xrl.us/rx6y
undef and seek on filehandles opened to references causes segfaults (#40407) "buu" discovered that if you open a filehandle to an in-memory scalar, and then undef the scalar, perl will segfault. While this is probably a silly thing to do at the best of times, a segfault is perhaps a tad severe to indicate that it's wrong.
http://xrl.us/rx6z
One less than last week http://xrl.us/rx62
Get 'em while they're hot http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
The SIGSEGV, SIGBUS and SIGILL signals are now delivered
unsafely, paradoxically, for added safety.
http://xrl.us/rx63
David Landgren followed up on a problem posted by Xho Jingleheimerschmidt,
whereby running the same program under taint mode doubled the amount
of memory used. It turned out to be a problem to do with using the
x repetition operator on a list, rather than a scalar. Thus, the
fix was easy, but the reason remains unknown.
http://xrl.us/rx64
The Mac OS/X / SpamAssassin problem continued to roll along with Dominic Dunlop trying to get a handle on the problem. Alas, without success.
http://xrl.us/rx65
Yuval Kogman got caught out by the interpolation of scalar references
in a string and wondered if it was a bug or a feature. It is,
of course, a feature, and perlref was amended to clarify the
fact.
http://xrl.us/rx66
Sebastian Steinlechner spotted a problem with the ordering of
variable declarations in IO::Socket and got things straightened
out.
http://xrl.us/rx67
Filip Filipov wanted to know how to write Storable data files
in Java, so that Perl could read them. Yuval Kogman thought that
it would be easier to use YAML or something else. Storable is
tied too intimately to Perl's internals to be used easily as an
interchange format.
http://xrl.us/rx68
The way perl allocates more memory than immediately (with an eye
to reducing the amount of subsequent reallocations required) was
tweaked slightly for 5.8.8. It turns out that this caused a
problem in DBD::ODBC . But knowing the cause of the problem is
half way to figuring out the solution.
http://xrl.us/rx69
The optimisations that Nicholas Clark introduced into inlined
constant subroutines a while back caused new warnings to emerge
in File::Slurp's test suite. But since the code in question is
somewhat questionable, Nicholas felt that it was working as
advertised.
Doctor, it hurts when I do this http://xrl.us/rx7a
Yves Orton and Nicholas Clark continued to kick around the idea of a pluggable regexp engine. Stay tuned for more information next week.
http://xrl.us/rx7b
Adriano Ferreira added test descriptions to lib/File/Copy.t,
http://xrl.us/rx7c
This summary was written by David Landgren. According to my records, last week's summary rolled the total words written past the 100 000 words threshold.
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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