"It's a very naive implementation [...]. Given the scary comments Nicholas added in that code, I'd be grateful to see whether one can come up with a case where that breaks" -- Rafael Garcia-Suarez, warning about warning about undef.
Some of the changes regarding Safe for 5.10 crept into the 5.8 maintenance track during change #33111, and Jerry D. Hedden wondered if this was a bug or a feature. Nicholas Clark cursed Perforce but felt that it could all go into 5.8 in the long run.
entering a zone of turbulence http://xrl.us/bfs2g
Sure enough, black smoke emerged from the chimney of Steve Hay's lab.
Smoke [5.8.8] 33111 FAIL(F) MSWin32 WinXP/.Net SP2 (x86/2 cpu) http://xrl.us/bfs2i
Similarly, the integration of consting goodness in change #33119 also caused grief on Cygwin. Jerry wondered if the blead changes in #32681 needed to be integrated as well.
http://xrl.us/bfs2k
usemymalloc failures In a discussion in a bug report (see #50352 below), it will be
revealed that Perl's own malloc is usually faster than the
malloc delivered with the C library. Jerry D. Hedden removed
the -Uusemymalloc from his Cygwin build, thereby switching from
the system malloc to Perl's, thereby gaining a boost in speed
for free.
He reported success for 5.10 and blead, but a few tests failed in 5.8. In fact, the error appears to be there as far as he was able to go back in history.
there was a reason for this http://xrl.us/bfs2n
PathTools upgrade) Steve Hay noticed that the major rewrite to Win32's catdir,
catfile and canonpath caused major failures in
ExtUtils::MakeMaker handling on Windows. The more Steve
looked, the more he found the new behaviour confusing.
Michael G. Schwern believed that part of the problem was the
use of catdir, when in fact catpath was what was called
for (regarding the handling of C: as a volume specification).
Ken Williams chalked it up as another case of "File::Spec is
just hard to use correctly".
but Path::Class makes it fun! http://xrl.us/bfs2p http://xrl.us/bfs2r
next resetting match variables - bug or feature? Nicholas Clark was puzzled by ext/B/t/deparse.t issuing a
warning on 5.10 but not on 5.11, and narrowed it down to
what remained in a match variable at the beginning of a loop.
There was a difference, depending on whether the loop had
reached the end of its scope, or had been short-circuited
via a next.
coming up next http://xrl.us/bfs2t
After the initial silence following Michael G. Schwern's plea to make Perl survive 2038, the thread kicked off in earnest this past week.
Some people believed that it was just a question of having a 64-bit
machine and 64-bit time_t datatype. To a certain extent, this is
already the case for many platforms other than Unix, be they IBM
mainframes, VMS minis or even Windows micros. In this case, 32-bit time_t
quantities are shims over datatypes of greater precision, provided only for
compatibility with Unix.
The real problem is that of programs that store 4-byte time_t quantities
in binary files. The other problem is with localtime which is currently
specified for 32 bit quantities, which means that if the system can handle
the year 2050 as an epoch, it might be unable to format it a readable
manner. And one nice thing that localtime does, more or less for free,
is to figure out which time zone you're in.
Craig Berry suggested that the first step would be to plan some tests
to check the results of date arithmetic that push past 2038, mark them
as TODO, and then go about fixing them. It would seem evident that
some %Config variables would be useful to help people determine
what is implemented natively and what needs to be worked around.
Mark Mielke pointed out that the DateTime modules are perfectly
2038-safe, but you still run into problems if you try to map a
DateTime value outside the 1970-2038 range onto an 32-bit epoch value.
Unfortunately, for some people, it's just too slow.
Aaron Crane gave a fascinating historical overview of time handling in Unix.
TAI64 for attosecond precision, anyone? http://xrl.us/bfs2v
Rob "Sisyphus" observed incorrect sprintf behaviour with the
latest MinGW runtime and wondered if anyone else had encountered the
problem. He was hesitant to label it a MinGW bug, since simple C
programs using sprintf worked as expected.
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes said that he'd heard that the MinGW
developers had tweaked the behaviour of vnsprintf, and that
put Rob on the right track.
bug, many eyes, shallow http://xrl.us/bfs2x
uc/lc warnings in CGI.pm Now that lc(undef) issues a warning as it return an empty string,
one of the first (no doubt of many) consequences was that CGI's
test suite issued a couple of warnings. Lincoln Stein folded the fix
into his copy of CGI.
old horse, new tricks http://xrl.us/bfs2z
At that point, Nicholas Clark noticed that there were some gratuitous differences between the core version and that on CPAN, and hoped that the porters and Lincoln could reconcile the differences. No word back from Lincoln as we went to press.
get back together again http://xrl.us/bfs23
PerlIO::scalar Ben Morrow produced a cut-down code sample that showed a spurious warning when opening a scalar as an output stream. He proposed a patch, but Hugo van der Sanden thought it would cause an overdose of magic.
http://xrl.us/bfs25
Alex Davies encountered a globbing problem in File::DosGlob and
was amazed to discover that things had been like that since the year
2000. Steve Hay accepted the patch.
http://xrl.us/bfs27
Robin Barker noticed that the restriction against using brace groups,
that appeared in 2006 for versions of g++ available at the time, no
longer seemed to be required for the current g++ 4.2. This in turn
allowed other warnings that g++ issued over the *REFCNT_inc macros
to go away. Rafael accepted the patch.
http://xrl.us/bfs29
Andy Dougherty came back with a new attempt to teach Configure
how to the the right thing on the IRIX platform.
over to you, Mr. Cantrell http://xrl.us/bfs3b
use encoding 'utf8' (#48419) Back in December, Ville Luolajan-Mikkola reported that trying
to use Safe and encoding :utf8 results in a fight,
and the program loses.
Rafael Garcia-Suarez suggested importing the needed methods into the Safe compartment might be a suitable work-around, but he was doubtful that Safe could be fixed safely.
putting the accent on safety http://xrl.us/bfs3d
James Nemanich stumbled across the RT queue and filed a bug about
perl, not realising that in fact the bug was in his own code. People
pointed him to Perlmonks, Perl::Critic, pragmas strict and
warnings, the Learn Perl mailing list (empty message to
subscribe-learn@perl.org if you want to help) and Alexandr Ciornii
went as far as rewriting the original code in modern day, idiomatic
Perl.
all part of the service http://xrl.us/bfs3f
CGITempFile causes Insecure dependency in sprintf in perl 5.10.0 (#50322) Steve Hay used CGI and uncovered a
bug due to the fact that in 5.10, printf format strings are now
considered tainted. In the case of CGI, the routine in question
reads the contents of an environment variable when composing the
canonical name of the temporary file.
Steffen Müller suggested a couple of fixes to resolve the issue, the first one being the least intrusive, the second one being more to his likely.
Tim Jenness wondered why CGI didn't use File::Spec->tmpdir
instead, since this particular wheel has already been invented over
there.
taint fun http://xrl.us/bfs3h
Lincoln Stein stopped by to say that he was going to use Steffen's fix in an upcoming 3.33 release.
still accepting patches http://xrl.us/bfs3j
Storable extremely slow for large trees of data (#50352) Clinton Pierce had a data structure that when dumped with
Data::Dumper, produced about 8Mb of output. The same structure
takes less than a second to be dumped with Storable, as long as
perl 5.6 is used. If perl 5.10 is employed instead, the time taken
balloons out to 5 to 8 seconds.
Naturally he wanted to know whether this was a bug. Nicholas Clark suggested he take the 2.18 version available on CPAN (which is bundled with 5.10) to see if there was any difference on 5.6 (thereby isolating the problem to the module or the core. Unfortunately Clinton was on a Windows box without a compiler. Fortunately, Steve Hay was around and he was able to compile 2.18 on 5.6, and confirmed the slowdown on both 5.8 and 5.10 (while 5.6 remained fast).
After some more research, Steve reported that the choice of malloc
(Perl's or the C library) made a very significant difference to the
time taken. In both cases, Perl's own malloc was a couple of orders of
magnitude faster. He noted that Activestate built their Perl
distribution on Windows with the system malloc since it was a
necessary precondition for their fork emulation.
Curiously enough, Clinton's 5.6 installation was already using the
system malloc. No-one was able to pin down the precise reason
for the slowdown, although it was likely that 5.8 and 5.10's full
UTF-8 implementation may be a culprit.
fancy a strawberry? http://xrl.us/bfs3m
Martin Becker suggested a more mathematically precise definition of the modulus operator, and provided a patch to prove it.
unapplied http://xrl.us/bfs3o
exit in open3() on win32 (#50374) Alex Davies reported a curious set of circumstances that would
cause IPC::Open3 exit when you least expected it.
this is a feature? http://xrl.us/bfs3q
GIMME_V broken with 5.10.0/GCC and XS (#50386) Robert May reported some strife with GIMME_V always returning
G_VOID regardless of context with an Activestate perl and XS
compiled with gcc. On the other hand, the same code compiled with
VC++ 6 behaved as expected.
Jan Dubois explained that this was due to a difference in how gcc and VC++ laid out their bitfields. It turns out that VC++ is rather profligate in its use of memory to store a number of bitfields, and Jan promised to deliver a patch that would allow VC to be more parsimonious in its memory consumption.
Armed with this information, Robert was able to twiddle a switch on gcc to order it to lay out bitfields in an identical manner to VC++, which solved his immediate problem.
Unfortunately, a blanket compiler switch override would then cause
a gcc for a Strawberry Perl to compile his XS module incorrectly,
and thus Rob needed to know how one could figure out what compiler
was used to build the perl within a Makefile.PL. Jan suggested
probing for values in the Config hash, as well as all you ever
wanted to know but were too afraid to ask about distinguishing an
Activestate build of perl from a perl built directly from source.
http://xrl.us/bfs3s
Jan followed up with a patch to lock down the underlying sizes used in constructing bitfields.
http://xrl.us/bfs3u
Filter::Util::Call problem with $_ (#50430) Ambrus Zsban reported an oddity with an identity source filter (that
is, one that doesn't transform anything). If he removed an innocuous
assignment to $_, everything stopped working.
deep filter voodoo http://xrl.us/bfs3w
321 new + 1491 open = 1812 (15 created, 1 closed)
http://xrl.us/bfs3y http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
Jim Cromie uploaded a development version of B::Generate that
behaves correctly with 5.10 and 5.11 (although it segfaults on
5.8). He was hoping to be made co-maintainer of the module, and
had a couple of questions for the porters, although no-one
ventured their opinion.
http://xrl.us/bfs32
He also had some special B portability macros fall out as a
consequence of the above.
http://xrl.us/bfs34
OP_SETSTATE is no longer. Paul Johnson said he'd get around to
fixing it.
http://xrl.us/bfs36
Non-existent documentation leaves the implementation open to interpretation. Nicholas locked the implementation down and Devel::StackTrace had bet the wrong way. Dave Rolsky released 1.16 to CPAN.
http://xrl.us/bfs38
The test file t/04-packet-unique-push.t failed in a build, but ran successfully within the debugger.
the worst sort of failure http://xrl.us/bfs4a
John E. Malmberg commented that showing the pid when running under -Dv
would be more useful if it were rendered as hex under VMS, since all the
other VMS utilities do so. Craig A. Berry wondered if that just didn't
make things more confusing compared to how Perl works on all the other
platforms
http://xrl.us/bfs4c
Robin Barker's patch to silence compiler warnings about clobbering volatile C stack variables was deemed suitable by Rafael Garcia-Suarez.
http://xrl.us/bfs4e
Steven Schubiger's consting of util.c made it in.
http://xrl.us/bfs4g
He also added some consting tweaks to toke.c and universal.c , which Rafael applied.
Andy would approve http://xrl.us/bfs4i
He also managed to pull off a remarkable const char *const str in
taint.c .
http://xrl.us/bfs4k
Moritz Lenz reported an issue that cropped up on Perlmonks, where a simple regexp ran 1.5 orders of magnitude more slowly on 5.10. Andreas König identified the problem as being change #27903, in which Dave Mitchell removed some recursion trickery. Neither Dave nor Yves Orton were around to comment on the issue.
http://xrl.us/bfs4n
Yitzchak found a code example in POSIX that had drifted out of
focus and suggested how to make it work again. Applied.
$b be banished http://xrl.us/bfs4p
Steve Hay tidied up some compiler warnings on Win32, but Nicholas Clark came up with a better technique.
Moritz may also have uncovered a problem building blead with a parallel make, although the jury is still out.
http://xrl.us/bfs4r http://xrl.us/bfs4t
change #33109 trumps change #33106 http://xrl.us/bfs4v
Scott T. Hildreth reported a segfault with Term::ReadLine::Gnu .
Rafael was inclined to think the problem was a signal handler issue
and wondered if libreadline was to blame.
http://xrl.us/bfs4x
brian d foy was trying to clarify smart match behaviour in when , when
the when contained a &&. He was troubled by differences in what
the documentation said and what the implementation did.
learning perl, TNG http://xrl.us/bfs4z
Jerry D. Hedden todoified yet another threads::shared bug
concerning a shared object that is attached to a shared scalar.
http://xrl.us/bfs43
The bug in ExtUtils::CBuilder not honouring extra_compiler_flags,
that leads to the GIMME_V problem was filed by Robert May as a
ticket on the ExtUtils::CBuilder queue.
http://xrl.us/bfs45 http://rt.cpan.org//Ticket/Display.html?id=32806
Daniel Frederick Crisman spotted a typo in a test name from last
week's additions from Abigail regarding the test of for reverse ....
http://xrl.us/bfs47
Daniel also identified a possible POD markup error in the Japanese POD question last week.
ceci n'est pas une pipe http://xrl.us/bfs63
Robert May thought that the POD in encoding.pm talked about side effects far too much, so he dragged out the chain-saw and removed two duplicate sections.
may cause drowsiness http://xrl.us/bfs49
Reini Urban made some progress with his perl compiler project this week.
just in time http://xrl.us/bfs5b
Robin Barker noticed some sub-optimal POD formatting in File::Find
with C<{ bydepth =E<gt> 1 }> and proposed
an alternative.
try writing that in POD http://xrl.us/bfs5d
Nicholas Clark took a lateral thinking approach to solving the
parallel make bug for SDBM_File by provoking the same error
but in the POSIX module.
but not all the time http://xrl.us/bfs5f
Philippe Bruhat ran into a spot of bother trying to build 5.8.8 with a particularly recent version of the gcc compiler. Andy Dougherty and Andreas König gave him a couple of work-arounds, and Nicholas promised to make sure 5.8.9 (coming Real Soon Now) should have the fix.
going by the book http://xrl.us/bfs5h
Watching the smoke signals, failure reports came in from Steve Hay for Win32, as far as change #33169. No reports from other platforms.
last week's http://xrl.us/bfs5j
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes clarified the panic on copying a freed scalar: I
thought the magic of @ARGV was part of the problem, Yitzchak said that
any array at all will suffer the same erroneous behaviour.
http://xrl.us/bfs5m
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.
If you found this summary useful, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.
Just curious. I don't see this bug with 5.8.[78] on cygwin, even putting a loop around it (in case I were lucky). From Dave Mitchell's explanations in the thread I would have thought it should show up in previous versions of perl.
nice summary! thanks --stephan