=head1 This Week on perl5-porters - 6-12 July 2008

=head1 Topics of Interest

=head2 C<my $@> - a proposal

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00140.html

=head2 Encode 2.25 released!

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00157.html

=head2 Dual-life and autodie

  pumpking input appreciated
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00135.html

=head2 Strictly no indirect object syntax

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00215.html

=head2 F<t/op/exec.t> fails on Fedora

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00141.html

=head2 FiX segfault in serialized version objects

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00264.html

=head2 Perl histories back to 1995 in MarkMail

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00137.html

=head2 5.10.x Perl_op_clear PM_GETRE_SAFE still in CORE

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00139.html

=head2 Which test files need to use the watchdog() function?

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00156.html

=head2 Proposal for enhancement of Storable (2.18)

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00160.html

=head2 New probes

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00169.html

=head2 perl-5.10.0-4 -E<gt> perl-5.10.0-5 update appears to break DateTime

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00195.html

=head2 perl-5.10.0-4 -E<gt> perl-5.10.0-5 site_perl update needed

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00206.html

=head2 C<my $foo = "bar" if $baz;>

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00219.html

=head2 Changes in C<m//m> in 5.10

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00230.html

=head2 C<< shift-E<gt>(@_) >> doesn't do the same as C<&{+shift}>

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00242.html

=head2 Perl Benchmark Suite

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00241.html

=head2 formats, and C<write.t>'s sensitivity

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00262.html

=head2 C<Data::Dumper> patch

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00263.html

=head2 The C<assert()>ions in C<sv_chop()> and the passed-in pointer

  change 34138
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00277.html

=head2 perl cross compilation for at91sam9260

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00287.html

=head2 C<integer.pm> - behaviour v documentation

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00298.html

=head2 Problem in C<Exporter>

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00317.html

=head1 TODO of the week

=head1 Patches of Interest

=head2 F<test.pl> fix

In the previous weeks it came to pass that Jerry D. Hedden started working
on F<test.pl> to give it an overhaul. The latest version made it into blead.
Of great interest is a watchdog timer, that will allow tests that can stumble
around in the dark to be killed after an appropriate amount of time.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00153.html

=head2 watchdog() some IO tests

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00255.html

=head2 threads::shared 1.25

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00257.html

=head2 B-Debug-1.11 - B::Flags CORE test fix

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00276.html

=head2 [perl5db.t should not load Term::ReadLine::Gnu

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00285.html

=head2 threads::shared 1.25

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00289.html

=head2 Correction to change 34138

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00310.html

=head1 New and old bugs from RT

=head2 Security of ARGV using 2-argument open - It's a feature (#2783)

Joshua ben Jore made a fine argument for axing the too-clever
behaviour of C<open> by ignoring the shellish nature of such
characters as C<< < >>, C<< > >> and C<|>. This was judged as
being a little to backwards incompatible in 5.10, but could be
considered for 5.12.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00295.html

=head2 Storable seg faults under perl 5.8.0 solaris, maximal 64bit (#18049)

Bram wanted to know if the problem was caused by defining C<use64bitall>,
since the other combinations smoke cleanly for the Solaris CPAN testers.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00128.html

=head2 This problem seems to be fixed and a small patch for B::Xref (#18306)

Renée Bäcker believes this is fixed.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00197.html

=head2 Bug fix in C<malloc.c> (#50856)

Mark Noyes filled in details about this problem, where it transpires that
different parts of a program are calling Perl's C<malloc> and the underlying
libc C<malloc>. It nearly works, except for a minor detail regarding
the rounding-up alignment of the different source blocks.

  surprised it works at all
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00312.html

=head2 Feature: regexp modifier to disable interpolation like m'' (#54702)

Yves Orton grudgingly admitted that it adding a modifier to a
pattern, such as C</$foo/d>, to suppress interpolation, is doable.
In which case the above would be interpreted as an end-of-line
followed by literal 'foo'.

  but would it help
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00231.html

=head2 Panic in regex processing (unknown regstclass 0) (#55466)

Yves Orton suggested if that someone could isolate the regular expression
in the C<Net::IP> test suite that was giving 5.10 grief, then he would take
a look and see if he could fix it.

  yves helps those that help themselves
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00229.html

=head2 'once' warnings from xs modules in perl 5.10.0 (#55550)

Rafaël Garcia-Suarez didn't like Chia-liang Kao's idea of making
C<DynaLoader> load C<warnings> and instead suggested a GV_ADDMULTI
manoeuvre.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00186.html

=head2 overloading and formats (#55668)

Nicholas Clark demonstrated the interaction between formats and variables (the
former consume the latter) and suggested that any attempt to introduce
string overloading into the picture was destined to end in tears.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00261.html

=head2 Perl 5.10 breaks \N{} in regex interpolated inside regex (with charnames) (#56444)

YVes Orton gave the rationale behind the change (speed) that caused
the above failure to occur. That said, he had no idea what the underlying
cause of the problem was, and suggested someone fire up a debugger and
see why C<charnames> was being descoped.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00161.html

=head2 C<m/a{1,0}/> compiles but doesn't match a literal string (#56526)

Yves Orton confirmed that Michael Cartmell's reasoning was sound, as
was the patch. As such, someone should go ahead and apply it.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00228.html

=head2 C<pad_alloc> and C<fold_constants> are not members of public API (#56536)

Dmitry Karasik wanted to build C<B::Generate> on MSWin32, but the above
two API functions need to go public. Rafaël agreed to letting
C<fold_constants> out into the light, but declined C<pad_alloc>, as it's
too low-level.

  contents may settle in transit
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00185.html

=head2 5.10.0 crash on serialised v-strings (#56606)

John Peacock got to work to fix C<Data::Dumper> breakage when serialising with
version objects. Due to the incestuous nature of C<CPAN.pm>, the core and
the duality of C<version.pm>, he faced considerable difficulty in getting the
change to be heeded. In the end he tracked down the CPAN authors who use
C<Data::Dumper> to serialise version numbers (in F<META.yml> files) and
suggested that an upgrade of their own would be a wise course of action.

Unfortunately no-one could think of a better solution.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00178.html

=head2 C<Math::BigInt> gives completely (bogus results) when C<Math::BigInt::GMP> is used (#56608)

Marc Lehmann suggested there was a problem; Bram and Tels wanted to know
what version he was using before jumping to conclusions. Tels was pretty
sure that the symptoms pointed to a signed/unsigned mismatch.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00127.html

=head2 Perl 5.10.0 double-free bug with Regular Expressions (#56610)

Andris Kalnozols pointed to a new bug in 5.10 regarding tied hashes. Chris
Madsen slimmed the test case down considerably.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00126.html

=head2 PerlIO resource leaks on open() and then :pop in :unix and :stdio (#56644)

Goro Fuji nailed down some leaks in PerlIO with some patches and tests,
attributing the problems to (ahem) "a bad design of PerlIO virtual table".

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00147.html

=head2 using C<$1> evaluates strangely in list context when combined with ?: operator (#56674)

Not a bug when you can describe the reason behind the behaviour, as chromatic
did, with some additional material from Aristotle Pagaltzis.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00162.html

=head2 Some bugs in Perl regexp (core Perl issues) (#56690, #56738)

Serge discovered that C<print "ab" =~ /^a?(?=b)b/> prints nothing, instead of 1,
which is rather distressing. A couple of variations on the theme also produced
bad results. Abigail could do little more than write some TODO tests that
Steve Peters applied.

He also found another bug where C<$^N> and C<$1> disagreed about what had
just been matched. Yves Orton pointed out that as the match used a
quantified capture buffer (as in C</(foo){2}/>), the result is pretty much
undefined in the first place (and fixing it would be very difficult).

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00189.html
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00200.html

=head2 5.10.0 C<Attribute::Handlers> segmentation fault (#56766)

Naquad found a problem, Vincent Pit whipped up a quick patch to fix the
problem (which was in fact in Data::Dumper). Now waiting for application.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00217.html

=head2 \w with use locale does not match Russian letters (#56820)

Peter found a problem on Gentoo, not being able to match Russian
characters with \w after setting the locale. On the other hand it
worked perfectly on FreeBSD.

  here's a nickel, kid
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00251.html

=head2 Perl-5.8.8 compilation on AIX 5.1 (#56826)

Kawaljeet Kaur had problems building perl on AIX, and was unnerved
by all the "Note (probably harmless): No library found for -lfoo" messages.
Unfortunately, two tests failed in the test suite, which was the really
interesting bit, except we didn't get to find out which ones they were.

Andy Dougherty amended the documentation to minimise this possibility for
confusion, and earns a gold star for achieving less documentation at the
end of the process.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00250.html

=head2 No test coverage for the DO_UTF8() branch of case FF_CHECKCHOP in pp_formline (#56834)

Nicholas Clark found some code that he thought was probably incorrect and
certainly inefficient, but was loathe to make the changes without a regression
test that actually exercised the code path in question.

He dropped a few hints as to how one might write a test that would hit the
right branch.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00259.html

=head2 Taint bug with C<\G> and C<pos()> on hash entries (#56842)

Matt Sergeant found another bug where C<pos> gets lost on the value
of a hash key... when taint mode is active.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00258.html

=head2 can't use v[0-9]+ as label (vstring) (#56880)

Trying to drop a C<v1:> as target for a C<next> and its ilk will cause a
syntax error (on 5.8 through 5.11).

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00271.html

=head2 regex utf8 "uninitialized value" error (#56902)

Ben Bullock related the tale of a regular expression generating spurious
"uninitialized value" warnings according to the current setting of UTF-8.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00274.html

=head2 DBI memory leak (#56908)

lav identified a leak in DBI that occurs in 5.10 but not in 5.8. Since
DBI plays fast and loose with the internals for speed, and the internals
were heavily reworked during the 5.9 development track, it's really not
that surprising.

And probably something that needs to be fixed in DBI rather than the core.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00283.html

=head2 Perl5 Bug Summary

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00278.html
  http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html

=head1 This is the BBC

=over 4

=item *

=back

=head1 New Core Modules

=over 4

=item *

=back

=head1 In Brief

=head2 Last week's summary

There were no summaries for the two previous weeks as Real Life imposed its
own constraints in a big way. I feel very guilty about this, please accept
my sincere apologies.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-07/msg00318.html

=head2 About this summary

This summary was written by David Landgren.

Weekly summaries are published on F<http://use.perl.org/> and posted
on a mailing list, (subscription: F<perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org>).
The archive is at F<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 or attending a YAPC to help support the development
of Perl.