"This comment in mg.c scares me: /* Not sure why the av can get
freed ahead of its sv, but somehow it does */" -- Marc Lehmann,
uncovering ancient evil.
Dave Mitchell performed some stellar file refactoring to bring Misc Attribute Decoration under control. As a result, the only extra file is a two-liner madly.c file.
preprocessor does the rest http://xrl.us/twg2
Steve Hay wanted to add a new Config variable to indicate that
perl was simply capable of emulating a fork. This would eliminate
the need for some exceptionally hairy boolean logic that no-one gets
right, and thus is subject to error.
He knew how to create new entries in the win32 config files, but
wasn't sure how to move on from there. H.Merijn Brand explained that
the process was semi-automated, although he had spent time improving
it recently so that less manual work was required.
Craig Berry noted that it would be nice to set this up for VMS as
well, since that platform lacks Unix-style fork semantics, but he
was happy to punt with an undef for the time being.
http://xrl.us/twg3
There is an array of data that the regular expression engine uses,
but if debugging is enabled, the core needs to know about it as
well. And since a debugging build is the exception, and we don't
want to bloat the core for no reason, the array is hosted
either the extension or the core, depending on whether -DDEBUGGING
is defined.
Paul Green discovered that a recent patch from Yves Orton failed to build on Stratus VOS, because the linker ended up failing to link the array to anything in a debugging build. Yves explained it all very well, so hopefully Paul will be able to concoct something that satisfies the VOS linker.
http://xrl.us/twg4
Adriano Ferreira wondered why the latest available Perl for Cygwin was not 5.8.8. (hint: the current maintainer stepped down and asked for volunteers to take over. Does this sound familiar?)
Slaven Rezic said that he had succeeded in building some of the
trickier modules such as Tk, and so he and H.Merijn Brand
swapped notes.
http://xrl.us/twg5
In other Cygwin news, Jan Dubois tweaked Makefile.PL to get it to compile Win32.xs.
http://xrl.us/twg6
dmakes for building perl on Win32? Following on from Steve Hay's desire to drop old make support
on Win32, David Landgren asked whether it would be possible for an
explanatory error message to be issued if an old dmake was pressed
into service, to give the luckless programmer a pointer to the
documentation that tells them what to do.
Steve tweaked the Makefile and therefore showed that it was
possible, except that the message doesn't explain what to do
to fix the problem.
http://xrl.us/twg7
fields pragma in blead prohibits reblessing Andreas König noticed that one can no longer bless a fields
object into another package (noticed by the fact that a CPAN
module, Danga::Socket, now fails its test suite).
Dan Kogai, the module in question's author offered a workaround
to repair the breakage, but remained puzzled as to why the
error (Modification of a read-only value) was occurring.
http://xrl.us/twg8
Jan Dubois saw regular deadlocks in a threads test on Win32,
and wondered if it was related to the hangs that Steve Hay
sees in his test smokes. Steve Hay in turn thought that this
particular problem started showing up around the time threads
1.53 was released.
Jerry D. Hedden thought that the problem is probably quite deep and has only come to light now that multi-CPU boxes are more common, and thus are really testing the threads implementation instead of just pretending. If fact, he figured out how the test was failing, but didn't know how to track down the culprit that would explain why.
http://xrl.us/twg9
Nicholas had a long conversation with himself after looking at Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni's coverage reports and noticing that only the UTF-8 variant of a section of code in the regexp engine was visited by the test suite.
He wanted to find a non-UTF-8 pattern to shed light on the other
side of the path. He managed to find one, but felt that the fact
that it used re 'eval' was cheating a bit. He then thought of
a better way, but tripped over a bug in a study'ed variable.
Yves Orton said he'd take a look at things when he had some time.
http://xrl.us/twha
B Joshua ben Jore taught the B modules how to deal with user
pragmas. Steve Hay and Yves Orton taught the patch to play nicely on
Windows, and Rafaël Garcia-Suarez fixed up the tests.
http://xrl.us/twhb
Deparse.pm gets confused by slices Bo Lindbergh produced a patch to stop Deparse.pm getting confused
between package and lexical variables when slices are involved.
Nicholas Clark chided him for copying code, so Bo came back with a
fully-refactored improvement that Rafaël applied.
New! Improved! http://xrl.us/twhc
s///e (#40274) Appears fixed in blead, probably when the regular expression engine went re-entrant.
http://xrl.us/twhd
Marc Lehmann tracked down a problem concerning buffering in PerlIO.
http://xrl.us/twhe
bignum returns NaN when raising integer value to negative power (#41050) E. Culver noted that if bignum is in force, 10 ** -1 returns Nan
(instead of 0.1).
brand new mathematics http://xrl.us/twhf
Sean M. Burke asked if anyone wanted to take over the maintenance
of perldoc, since he no longer had the time to devote the
attention it requires. Which is in fact not a whole lot.
Apply within http://xrl.us/twhg
Marcus Holland-Moritz noted that a bug, as reported by Aaron D.Ball, is FIB.
Fixed In Blead http://xrl.us/twhh
Marc Lehmann noted that gcc 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-20)
would rebuild perl every time make was run. Neither Andy Dougherty
nor Rafaël were able to reproduce the problem.
works for me, alas http://xrl.us/twhi
Marc also noted that any time he tried to use weak references in any non-trivial program, it would crash in any number of different and entertaining ways. Try as he might he was not able to produce a small test case, but offered some suggestions as to where to look.
sort of like Switch.pm http://xrl.us/twhj
map arguments get freed (#41062) Marc filed a third report concerning map that I was happy
to report as FIBbed.
http://xrl.us/twhk
A stasis, of sorts. Still stuck at 1501 open tickets.
http://xrl.us/twhm http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
Test::Simple/More/Builder/Builder::Tester version 0.66 escaped
from the Schwerniverse.
http://xrl.us/twhn
Time::HiRes is happy again. One has to tread lightly on XS code that is still able to run on 5.004.
http://xrl.us/twho
A truly satisfactory approach to install missing
Compress/IO/{Base,Zlib} has not been found, but the current
solution is good enough.
something special http://xrl.us/twhp
Robin Barker explained precisely why integer exponentiation may return a floating point result.
http://xrl.us/twhq
Adriano Ferreira had a problem with @{%hash}{@idx} , since %hash
is now evaluated in scalar context for a slice. The construct was always
iffy at best, now it is an error.
less deviance http://xrl.us/twhr
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes ensured that -DDEBUGGING=both sets -g ,
because it would be a pity if it didn't.
http://xrl.us/twhs
Jim Cromie took a stab at refactoring dump.c to remove some cut-and-paste code and asked for some XS mavens to make sure he hadn't made any drastic mistakes.
Warnocked http://xrl.us/twht
Yves supplied a few more tweaks to make it easier to create regexp engine plug-ins, which were applied, with a few tweaks.
http://xrl.us/twhu
Jerry D. Hedden realised that Perl_save_destructor is not a mathom,
since it is required by Opcode. Rafael unmathomised it.
Back from the cemetary http://xrl.us/twhv
Jan Dubois moved some files around between win32/ext/Win32 and ext/Win32, which made sense, but had some surprising cascade effects.
http://xrl.us/twhw
Andy Lester forwarded a message containing information about the Klocwork analysis of Perl, but Jonathan Rockway pointed out that a password is needed to pass the gate.
Let me in http://xrl.us/twhx
John E. Malmberg issued an extensive followup to Craig A. Berry's remakes on the patch to provide VMS xterm support for the debugger.
http://xrl.us/twhy
Ilya Zakharevich delivered the missing link for building perl on OS/2.
http://xrl.us/twhz
This summary was written by David Landgren. Sorry about being later than usual. Too many end of year parties, and I'd sooner drink wine and scoff oysters than write summaries.
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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