Yes, I complained to Corel, and they said "thank you for your insight as a valued customer, we forwarded this to our manager of customer support". So maybe someday they will fix the problem, or maybe they will not bother. -- Glenn Linderman, being realistic.
The discussion of trapping error messages, and future-proofing the code that traps error messages continued on its merry way this week, with lots of attempts and trying to figure out what the code would look like from the client side. If that was sorted out, the implementation would be trivial. The biggest issue was minimising the amount of makework code required on the client side, otherwise people will never remember the incantation and will get it wrong and/or waste time.
I would say Glenn Linderman made the best proposal, way down at the
end of the thread, with his errorcodes module. But then I'm not
sure I'm qualified to judge, since my code never has errors.
http://xrl.us/s5fp
And the thread trickled on into November.
http://xrl.us/s5fq
Andy Dougherty and Cosimo Streppone waded through the difficulty of getting Perl compiled on a 64-bit SuSE linux host. But by the end of the fortnight, Tels, who raised the original problem was still not getting complete satisfaction.
http://xrl.us/s5fr
Jerry D. Hedden wanted to know if patches could be forwarded to
him first, instead of blead, as it would result in fewer
patches all round. There was some reluctance, since there are many
cases where the putative maintainer is busy with Other Things in
Real Life and are not always as responsive as Jerry. Thus, people
like to be able to make changes to the codebase and worry about
CPAN catching up afterwards.
In terms of the threads module, Dave Mitchell stated that he
still considered the core as being the primary "home" of the
source, the CPAN modules just being a way for people to get new
thread goodness now, without having to wait for 5.10.
http://xrl.us/s5fs
5.\d\d.\d+ Andy Dougherty thanks H.Merijn Brand for taking the time to prepare this patch. H.Merijn pointed out that it was unlikely to be exercised by the current test infrastructure, and if people cared about older perls they would have to pay special attention.
Listen up http://xrl.us/s5ft
File::Spec/Cwd maintainers Ken Williams announced that his copious spare time is no longer sufficient to devote the time required to keep these two modules happy and bug free, and asked for volunteers interested in becoming co-maintainers.
Johan Vromans kicked off the idea of a small working group with
access to a wide variety of platforms and perls to sit down and and
figure out how to cross-platform file-system manipulations the Right
Way. Ken Williams thought that Path::Class was the right way,
but admitted to being slightly biased, since he wrote it.
http://xrl.us/s5fu
dprofpp Nicholas Clark bemoaned dprofpp's sluggishness at processing a 150MB
tmon.out file, and wondered whether anyone who had said that they
would take a look at the problem had ever made any headway. He
wondered if the suggestion to rewrite it in terms of Simon Cozens's
Devel::DProfPP module was feasible. For starters, he wasn't sure
of how to go about setting up regression tests.
http://xrl.us/s5fv
Data::Bind compilation failure with blead This failure was caused by the fact that warnings.pm no longer loads
Carp at compile time, only if needed, and this masked what was, strictly
speaking, a syntax error in Data::Bind.
If the change that gave rise to this were to be backported to
maint, a number of CPAN modules would break, which would mean
that 5.8.9 would not be a drop-in replacement for the 5.8.x series. Yves
wondered whether it was sufficient to flag it as an important main upgrade
issue, and document a work-around.
http://xrl.us/s5fw
Christian Winter was puzzled by how closures behave when the closed-over routine is named, and the documentation didn't help him understand what was happening.
After it was explained to him, he cooked up a patch for perlref.pod,
which Rafaël Garcia-Suarez applied.
http://xrl.us/s5fx
Rafaël ran valgrind over blead, and noted that the memory was
leaking like a sieve. Nicholas made a couple of suggestions on leaks
that may be caused by optrees being half-destructed. Yves cleaned up
the leaks from the regular expression engine.
Rafaël ran a second round, and 14 previous test files came up clean.
http://xrl.us/s5fy
He found two leaks with warnings.pm. One, he fixed, the other, he
did not know how to proceed.
http://xrl.us/s5fz
B::Bytecode Nicholas Clark received out-of-band feedback on the announcement that
B::Bytecode has been dropped for 5.10. Turns out there are people
out there who are using it to deliver shrouded Perl code.
Nicholas pointed out that it was dropped because no-one who cared sufficiently about the matter had neither the time nor inclination to look after it. If someone starts to maintain it again then it's another story. In the meantime, he wondered what other solutions were available to "protect" Perl source code.
Steve Hay's Filter::Crypto probably comes the closest these days.
Nicholas, imitating Bruce Schneier, noted that "As the attacker,
you only have to find the weakest link. As the defender, you have
to ensure that no leaks are weak. The defender can only delay the
inevitable."
Adam Kennedy thought that munging the code through Perl::Squish
and then possibly creating random xyzzy variable names would go
a long way to making the code sufficiently difficult to understand.
You could also check that the test suite still succeeds after
shrouding.
Andy Dougherty mentioned that it might be worthwhile hanging out a sign in the usual places saying "Orphaned modules! The following modules will be removed from 5.10 unless someone offers to maintain them". Not that he expects anyone to reply, but at least that way we don't have to feel guilty about it.
Scott Walters admitted to liking Logo and SNOBOL, and that it might be fun some day to revive the Bytecode material in order to allow those languages to emit Perl bytecodes, which could then run Perl (and access CPAN). Some day.
http://xrl.us/s5f2
Last words on the matter from Tels, in November:
http://xrl.us/s5f3
$PERL_UNICODE) An old bug from several months ago raised its head again. With the
restructuring of some part of the internals, we achieved the possibility
of have two right answers to a test, and Nicholas Clark couldn't find
an easy way to hack the test suite to cope with the fact that (to
paraphrase) foo() could return "bar" or "rat", and either would be
okay. He was then thoroughly swamped by hordes of volunteers beating
a path to his Inbox offering to help out. (I am being sarcastic).
The problem surfaced again, this time managing to snag Dave Mitchell's attention (who lamented that his p5p spool currently stands at over 4000 messages), and so he missed it the first time around. (And what are my summaries? Chopped liver?)
As the warnings code was mainly Dave's handiwork, he was able to craft a fix to improve the situation.
http://xrl.us/s5f4
Glenn Linderman was playing around with PAR, and didn't realise that WordPerfect Mail had discretely slipped a perl58.dll into c:\windows\system when he wasn't looking. So the PAR stuff spat out a strange message about a version of Perl he didn't have, and it took him a certain amount of time to figure out why things were misbehaving.
To cut a long story short, it would have helped if canonical file
names appeared somewhere in the error message. The fact that Glenn
had been using PAR meant that $^X and $0 didn't point anywhere
near the library.
Yves pondered whether it would make more sense for Perl to use a little more of the Windows infrastructure, and stashing version information of installed modules into the registry. Andy Dougherty wasn't too sure about this, feeling that this was more of a vendor issue than one for the porters.
Vadim Konovalov pointed out that the registry was not a good idea for a number of reasons. A big problem is that locked-down business installations may not even let the user account write to the registry.
Glenn thought the whole registry business was annoying, because if you copy an application from an old machine to a new one, it doesn't work, because of all the missing registry entries. At this stage, the thread started to discuss the finer aspects of how to get multiple Perl installations playing nicely on the same machine, and strategies for deal with moving the Perl directory around and still have it work.
http://xrl.us/s5f5
Andy Dougherty provided a useful executive summary here:
http://xrl.us/s5f6
http://xrl.us/s5f7
Chia-liang Kao asked what the porters thought of his module
selfless.pm, that does a my $self = shift. The reactions
varied from "cute" to "sick".
http://xrl.us/s5f8
Stephen McCamant followed up on Juerd's incorrectly deparsed monster
reference {{{{{[[[[[[[[[[]]]]]]]]]]}}}}} and produced a real
program puts it in context and produces bad behaviour. He also
bundled in a patch, to correct the problem in B/Deparse.pm.
http://xrl.us/s5f9
UNITCHECK blocks Now available as a module on CPAN.
http://xrl.us/s5ga
FindBin.pm fixed wrong treatment of PATH entries Alexey Tourbin had a problem with FindBin getting mixed up with executable files appearing in directories on DOS-ish platforms. In a nutshell, he wanted to skip any irrelevant files that may be encountered.
Adam Kennedy suggested that Alexey's one-line fix would be complete with a test.
http://xrl.us/s5gb
(?FAIL) pattern Yves Orton discovered a flaw in his previous work on adding jump
tries (/(foo[ab]|bar[cd])/ worked, but /(foo[ab]|bar[cd])+/
did not). In the process of fixing it, he invented a new regop
FAIL, which deals with things in a more elegant manner. And some
tests, too.
This lets you specify deep in the middle of a pattern that, no you really don't want to match anything at all. Sometimes, this comes in handy.
http://xrl.us/s5gc
Jerry D. Hedden landed a patch to allow multiple Perl interpreters and threads play nicely together, following an issue raised by Jan Dubois.
the big issue http://xrl.us/s5gd
Jan had a look at the code and made a couple of suggestions on how to improve it.
http://xrl.us/s5ge
Yves Orton tweaked the Win32 Makefile to add a couple of targets,
regnodes, which comes in handy when hacking on the regular
expression engine (one can see what itch this scratches) and
regen which does the whole lot. Making only regnotes avoids
a considerable amount of useless recompilations.
http://xrl.us/s5gf
Joshua ben Jore appears to understand some of the more esoteric
improvements that Yves has been making in the regular expression
engine. He asked how (?COMMIT) behaves in terms of (?>...)
and was most impressed with the answers Yves gave. Since I've never
taken the time to understand the usefulness of (?>...) in the
first place, it all went slightly over my head.
http://xrl.us/s5gg
IO::Compress modules Paul Marquess expressed the belief that the IO::Compress modules
were sufficiently stable to be moved out of went out of beta status.
He made one final tweak.
http://xrl.us/s5gh
This triggered some problems with threads and Readonly,
and so he fixed that up.
http://xrl.us/s5gi
And then bumped the version numbers and called it a day.
http://xrl.us/s5gj
More backtracking goodness escaped from our favourite mad scientist of the regular engine. I'll have to play around with all this stuff to see what sense I can make of it, but it certainly looks nifty.
http://xrl.us/s5gk
Steve Hway was having problems with his smoke machine. Sometimes a test will hang, and the test run is ruined. It used to be worse, but it's still not perfect.
http://xrl.us/s5gm
So a method is needed to monitor the tests, and detect when they get wedged. And, more importantly, killing them when they do get wedged. Jerry D. Hedden offered a patch for t/TEST that sets up a monitor thread to keep an eye out for tests that get stuck (and thus completely ruin a smoker's evening).
Unfortunately, it didn't work out as expected, since it appeared that when things go wrong and the monitor thread tries to kill the blocked thread, it is the parent of the blocked thread that winds up taking the bullet.
Jan Dubois said that a robust solution to this would be to use
Win32::Job, a module that ActiveState wrote to help keep work
with building ppm distributions, and not having one bad package
in the batch blocking the show. But alas, Win32::Job is not
in the core.
Nicholas Clark did not see this as an obstacle. If the module was needed, in order to test core modules, then there was no reason it should not become core.
Another thing Jan wanted to do was to emulate Unix's kill -9, $pid,
to take out a whole process group in one fell swoop. He was
strongly encouraged to proceed with this.
http://xrl.us/s5gn
@- becomes arbitrarily large (#36046) Yves Orton figured that this was fixed in blead, and added a couple
of tests to make sure it stays that way.
http://xrl.us/s5go
study() with utf8 enabled breaks regexps (#37646) Similarly, Rafaël Garcia-Suarez noted that this bug was also
fixed in blead.
http://xrl.us/s5gp
sprintf "%#04X" also uppercases the 0x-prefix (#40583)
Dr. Ruud noticed that, for instance, sprintf "%#04x", 15 produces the
slightly odd looking 0X0F, and contended that it should produce 0x0F,
as per the C spec, or the Perl documentation, or something.
This kicked off a large thread where it was noted that Perl lets
sprintf produce binary 0b001011 strings, but not 0B001011,
that perl doesn't know how to eval "0X0F" and a few other things
besides. By the end of the thread, blead had been patched in
various different ways, tests added and documentation amended, in an
attempt clean up most of the glaring inconsistencies.
http://xrl.us/s5gq
Source code patch for win32/perlhost.h (#40591)
Kenneth L. noted a problem with building perl on Win32 with dmake
and MinGW. Steve Hay noted that it was fixed in blead, and
suggested what packages Ken should download in order to build a perl
without such problems.
http://xrl.us/s5gr
Schmorp (possibly Marc Lehmann in disguise) found that when perl runs out of memory, it needs to allocate memory in order to print the error message. But it runs out of memory, so it has to allocate some memory to... you get the picture. And Schmorp gets a segfault.
there must be A Better Way To Do It http://xrl.us/s5gs
gnu/linux (glibc) likely needs USE_PERL_SBRK (#40603) Marc Lehmann found that bad things happen when one uses modules
that use pthreads with a perl built to use its internal malloc
(via usemymalloc=y). It seems that both glibc and perl's
mallocs wind up allocating overlapping areas, with predictably
hilarious results.
It turns out that both perl and glibc call sbrk to acquire more
memory, but sbrk is not thread-safe, so concurrent calls all get
the same result.
Andy Dougherty wondered whether the hints for linux/glibc should
prevent usemymalloc=y from being chosen, or whether usemymalloc=y
provides such benefits that it may be worth spending some effort
to get everything playing nicely.
Nicholas Clark remembered that people have been having trouble with
threads on FreeBSD, and that it may well be for this very same
reason, and usemymalloc=y is definitely worthwhile on that
platform.
http://xrl.us/s5gt
srand() behaviour with large numbers (#40605) Brian Szymanski uncovered some nasty behaviour with srand() when
the seed approaches the size of the CPU width.
http://xrl.us/s5gu
Where yet again Sadahiro Tomoyuki does battle with UTF-8...
and wins! http://xrl.us/s5gv
Why you should always assign to $VERSION in a BEGIN block.
http://xrl.us/s5gw
The bug report of the problem raised by Glenn Linderman (see Topics of interest).
http://xrl.us/s5gx
Perl_pp_entersub() (#40681) Interesting thread, not enough time to summarise it, sorry.
http://xrl.us/s5gy
8 more, 5 fewer, leaves 1531 http://xrl.us/s5gz
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
Object::Accessor was added to the core.
http://xrl.us/s5g2
After a debate over the accuracy of the name, Term::UI was added
to the core.
too late to rename it http://xrl.us/s5g3
threads underwent version inflation last fortnight
1.45 http://xrl.us/s5g4
1.46 http://xrl.us/s5g5
1.47 http://xrl.us/s5g6
1.48 http://xrl.us/s5g7
1.49 http://xrl.us/s5g8
And threads-shared wasn't left behind, now up at version 1.05
http://xrl.us/s5g9
And Michael G. Schwern announced the release of a beta version (0.64_03) of testing goodness.
Test::More/Simple/Builder http://xrl.us/s5ha
Andrew Savige wrote a new test for close-on-exec ($^F) in
t/run/cloexec.t, as there were no tests for it. Since the
test used a magic number, Steve Peters thought that it should
be hidden behind a preprocessor macro in perl.h.
This test brought to you by the number 3 and the letter F http://xrl.us/s5hb
The problems surrounding change #29050, a memory leak fix by Jarkko
were all sorted out. There was still a problem with glob and threads
on VMS that Craig A. Berry needed to look at.
done and dusted http://xrl.us/s5hc
Craig reported that this was due to asymmetry in reference counting in PerlIO_tmpfile .
http://xrl.us/s5hd
Vadim Konovalov wanted to know why DynaLoader's dl_win32.xs was located in ./win32 and not ./ext/DynaLoader along with everything else.
http://xrl.us/s5he
David Feldman began work on a patch to provide better
Attribute::Handlers diagnostics.
http://xrl.us/s5hf
Alexey Tourbin noted that the documentation and behaviour of
sv_setref_pv() differ, and couldn't decide if this was a bug
or a feature.
http://xrl.us/s5hg
Andreas König still didn't know what do about change #24542
breaking Math::Pari .
http://xrl.us/s5hh
Rafaël crossed off another perltodo TODO: readpipe and qx()
(backticks) are now overridable. Saves having to pull in an IPC module.
http://xrl.us/s5hi
Considerable progress was made on getting perl built with VC++ 2005 (VC8).
http://xrl.us/s5hj
Andreas König noted that XML::Writer 0.601 throws the new
Variable length character upgraded in print diagnostic, which
means it probably needs to be tweaked.
ooh, we found a bug http://xrl.us/s5hk
This summary was written by David Landgren.
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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