This is sort of like one of those useless Windows alert boxes that pop up to tell you something perfectly normal has happened and you should do nothing. "A USB device was safely removed!" Yes, thank you, I just removed it. It's this sort of hand-wringing user interface design ("but the user might not have expected that USB device to be removed, they should be told so they can maybe, possibly do something!") that I'd like Perl to avoid. -- Michael G. Schwern, wanting numeric upgrades to JFDI.
(Please take note of the date. I'm posting the backlog of summaries after having encountered problems trying to post them last month).
Michael G. Schwern's work (in a git branch) on Y2038+ dates continued apace, with H.Merijn Brand adding some configuration hooks for minimum and maximum date values, and discussions of how to set up tests to check for sane values in the year 803619167319 or so, especially if daylight savings is still in place.
fresh dates http://xrl.us/oscvv
H.Merijn Brand reported that the only failure on this platform for
5.8.9-to-be was one test in CGI. On the other hand, ODBM_File
was collapsing in a heap on blead, but H.Merijn was puzzled as to
why, since he was using the same configuration settings, and there
has been no changes under ext/ODBM_File between 5.8.x and blead.
Andy Dougherty thought that 5.8.x's Configure was missing
ODBM_File altogether, but blead's was a little more aggressive and
found a header that led it to conclude it could try and build
the extension, and this revealed that SUSE's dbm compatibility is
not up to par.
not ODBC http://xrl.us/oscvx
autodie behaviour with flock() Paul Fenwick asked what autodie should do in the light of blocking
and non-blocking file lock acquisitions, reasoning that calling
flock() in blocking mode means "I need this lock", whereas calling
it in non-blocking mode is a question: "Can I get this lock right
now?". From this, he could come up with sensible behaviour for
autodie.
The main sticking point was the possibility that a flock call
returns the EWOULDBLOCK error, which is not really an error, or
at least, not something worth dying for.
There was a long discussion about exceptions, errors and opportunistic
code, but the main point to take home is when Zefram pointed out
that if autodie's behaviour for flock is unsuitable, one is always
free to use a no autodie 'flock' to switch it off and handle it
manually.
blocked on flock http://xrl.us/oscvz
One may assume that Paul had been pulling his hair out over the
issue and that the documentation wasn't much help. So he improved
documentation for flock() in perlfunc.pod and tidied up the
code examples for by using lexical filehandles rather than globs,
checking for errors, and using constants rather than magic numbers.
aiding the cargo cult http://xrl.us/oscv3
CORE::truncate wrong? Paul then looked at truncate in trying to figure out how to
override it for autodie. His version could not take a typeglob
as a parameter, as the parser thought it was a bareword, due to
truncate's prototype.
He missed the fact that truncate can also work with the name of
a file, not just a file handle, which is why the prototype had to
fudge matters slightly.
This reminded Jan Dubois of a subtlety he encountered with unlink
a while ago: unlink() will remove the file named by $_, but
unlink(()) does nothing. The reason for this oddity is to prevent
unlink(@stuff) from unlinking whatever $_ points to, should
@stuff happen to be empty.
Jan gave up trying to implement the same semantics in pure Perl,
instead concluding that there are some core functions that are
impossible to duplicate. And perl 5.10's _ prototype doesn't
help either, given that it imposes scalar context.
Rafaël wondered what would happen (what would break) if he tweaked opcode.pl to change the prototype to something more suitable for Paul's need. Paul wondered too.
trunk call http://xrl.us/oscv5
Michael G. Schwern asked for people's considered opinions on how painful
it would really be to change the integer upgrade path from signed ->
unsigned -> double -> Inf to signed -> long long (or
whatever) -> arbitrary precision.
Specifically, he wondered how one creates a new SV type, what impact would this have on the code base, and whether it would break XS code.
Yuval Kogman answered all three questions quite clearly. And there ended the thread.
and python does it right http://xrl.us/oscv7
Following on from a change for bug #59168 reported by Father
Chrysostomos and an error in the test suite for XML::LibXML::Simple,
Nicholas Clark backed the regressing change out and added some tests
to identify the problem so that that future attempts don't cause
the same breakage. Dave Mitchell said he had a cold, and was thus
unlikely to look at things for a while.
get well soon http://xrl.us/oscv9
$* is no longer supported Rory Kingan was worried about some code that crawled out of the
woodwork complaining about $* no longer implemented in 5.10.
Aristotle Pagaltzis looked at the regular expressions Rory
posted and concluded that it was just cargo cult code that could
be safely deleted.
night of the living regexp http://xrl.us/oscwb
H.Merijn Brand thanked Sam Vilain and Abhijit Menon-Sen for helping
him get metaconfig hosted entirely in git (at
http://perl5.git.perl.org/), and declared its
Perforce branches officially closed.
it's dead, jim http://xrl.us/oscwd
Edward Peschko wrote about a problem with Readonly::XS that was
complaining about a use of Carp::croak. This can be traced to a
decision taken over three years ago to remove the loading of Carp
from warnings.
Since the author of the module sees no reason to release a new
version of the module just to fix this problem, it is unlikely
that it will be fixed in the near future. Certainly there is no
desire to put Carp back into warnings, and
Perl::Critic::StricterSubs can be used by authors to find such
problems (where client code loads module X, which in turn loads
module Y, and then the client code calls routines in Y without
having loaded it explicitly).
EWONTFIX http://xrl.us/oscwf
Here's a simple task that requires no C knowledge.
Fix the bugs revealed by running the test suite with the -t switch (via
make test.taintwarn).
(In fact, you don't even have to fix all of them, or most of them. Just updating perltodo.pod (patches welcome!) with the list of problematic files would be a start).
icc wants -fPIC on x86_64 Vincent Pit offered a patch to get Intel's icc compiling
XS modules correctly. Apparently this went nowhere.
http://xrl.us/oscwh
pod2text without a package or object reference Jari Aalto uncovered a problem in 5.10 with an undefined file descriptor
in Pod::Text. He supplied a patch for it, which appears to be stuck
in limbo.
http://xrl.us/oscwj
Jerry D. Hedden found some more tests that had problems with names of temporary file names being reused, so he changed them to use genuine temporary file names. Jan Dubois pointed out that this was likely to be a win for Windows systems that have on-access virus scanning, which can interfere with files that are rapidly deleted and recreated.
do not use a random method to generate random filenames http://xrl.us/oscwm
waitpid in IPC::Open[23] SYNOPSIS brian d foy noted that the documentation recommends using waitpid
to clean up, but the supplied examples don't. So he amended them to
provide baseline best practices for people to use.
do as i say not as i do http://xrl.us/oscwo
Back in August, when I was on my summ(?:ary|er) break, Karl Williamson filed a bug report relating to the inconsistent handling of 8-bit characters in strings during case mapping when no locale has been specified.
For instance, uc("\x{e0}") returns itself (à, or lowercase a grave)
rather than À (uppercase A grave). And this, regardless of whether there
are any multi-byte characters.
As a consequence, "\x{e0}" =~ /\x{c0}/i fails to match. Moritz Lenz
explained that this was a known bug but unfortunately was not fixable
because too much code relies on the current behaviour (which Karl
summarises quite nicely in the original bug report). Moritz showed how
one could make things work, at the expense of a little make-work code
involving utf8::upgrade.
Juerd Waalboer mentioned that it is fixable and scheduled for
implementation in perl 5.12, and that such backwards compatibility
issues have been noted in perl510delta.
Dave Mitchell sketched out how one might go about producing an
implementation for this, which would involve breaking out the
semantically overloaded SVf_UTF8 flag from SvFLAGS and
hanging it out in an auxilliary structure, which could be used to
store additional bits of information such as character set,
encoding, locales, UTF-8 caches and more, since there's no
space for such extravagances in a standard SV.
Juerd and Glenn Linderman weren't sure it this would end up being a win. Glenn in particular thought that locale and encoding metadata should probably be associated with file handles and the like.
prologue http://xrl.us/oscwq
Fast-forward to this week, when Karl reported back to the list, explaining that he'd implemented the change in behaviour in a copy of 5.10 source that seemed to do the trick, and asked the list where to go from here. In a nutshell, his patch extends ASCII semantics to the characters in the 128..255 Latin1 characters.
Glenn Linderman explained that Karl should use a pragma to introduce this new change for code that wants to use it.
Rafaël amended this suggestion by saying that the Unicode situation as it stands at the moment is such a mess that no pragma would be required for 5.12: it would just Do The Right Thing and backwards compatibility be damned. If the change was back-ported to the 5.10 track, then a pragma would be required in order to switch to the new behaviour.
Andreas König pointed out that Karl should base his patches
on blead, rather than 5.10. Rafaël said that starting a
branch from git://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git would be
as good a place as any from which to start.
Juerd thought that Karl should have no qualms about breaking code with his changes, since a certain amount of reverse breakage would may occur, whereby existing buggy code suddenly begins to work correctly...
famous last words "I just have to fix this bug" http://xrl.us/oscws
-Duseshrplib option gives ERROR: Undefined symbol: boot_DynaLoader (#58858) Tippa found a problem that (s)he was able to fix by a minor tweak to Makefile.SH and so filed a bug report. Jan Dubois repackaged the fix as a patch to makedef.pl. H.Merijn Brand confirmed the problem and the fix, and committed it as change #34379.
AIX en provence http://xrl.us/oscwu
Frank Meisschaert discovered that if STDOUT is redirected to a UTF-8 file
using the 3-argument form of open, the UTF-8 layer does not get set. The
work-around is to close STDOUT explicitly beforehand.
Michael G. Schwern confirmed that the problem exists from 5.8.8 to 5.10.0 to blead on OS/X .
not a team (p)layer http://xrl.us/oscww
grep unpack a/(a) loops and eats all memory (#58942) Ambrus Zsbán discovered a nifty way to have perl eat all available memory. Nicholas Clark reported that the problem had already been identified and fixed in blead. The correction will be backported to 5.10.1 and 5.8.9, which Nicholas said should be out within a month.
that's not a feature! http://xrl.us/oscwy
CGI(3perl) man page (#59132) Reuben Thomas identified two typos (in bug reports #59128 and #59130) which
were either already fixed in blead, or fixed thanks to his report. Reuben
found another typo in CGI, for which Renée Bäcker produced a small
patch, although this will have to be pushed upstream to Lincoln Stein,
CGI's maintainer.
meanwhile back at the CSHL http://xrl.us/oscw2
He also found a typo in File::stat (filed in bug #59134).
the proof is in the reading http://xrl.us/oscw4
Heading north. 268 new + 1032 open = 1300 (+6 -2)
http://xrl.us/oscw6 http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni uploaded what is essentially a documentation fix. Applied to blead by H.Merijn Brand.
http://xrl.us/oscw8
Russ Allbery fixed up the test suite to skip Unicode tests below
5.8, since Pod::Simple doesn't support UTF-8 encoding with
those versions, and rearranged things to deal with Red Hat
ispell idiosyncracies.
http://xrl.us/oscxa
This followed 2.1.3, which was Russ's first attempt at addressing error handling (emitting to STDERR instead of creating a POD ERRORS section), along with the errors that H.Merijn brought up recently, where an otherwise flawless smoke run was choking on UTF-8 locales.
http://xrl.us/oscxc
Gábor Szabó chose Debug::Client as the name for his client for
the built-in debugger.
now available on CPAN http://xrl.us/oscxe
Alexandr Ciornii set up dual life for Text::ParseWords . The
previous module on CPAN is 9.5 years old.
now available on CPAN http://xrl.us/oscxg
Paul Marquess was worried about the complexities and potential for
breakage if he created a composite distribution that contains all
his Compress::Zlib / IO::Compress::Gzip / IO::Compress::Bzip2
goodness. Fortunately the solution is simple and robust.
now available on CPAN http://xrl.us/oscxk
Michael G. Schwern reported on Method::Signatures and the
\@foo prototype, and how nice it all was.
now available on CPAN http://xrl.us/oscxn
http://xrl.us/oru8q
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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