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

Topics of Interest

"my $@" - a proposal

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

Encode 2.25 released!

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

Dual-life and autodie

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

Strictly no indirect object syntax

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

t/op/exec.t fails on Fedora

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

FiX segfault in serialized version objects

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

Perl histories back to 1995 in MarkMail

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

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

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

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

Proposal for enhancement of Storable (2.18)

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

New probes

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

perl-5.10.0-4 -> perl-5.10.0-5 update appears to break DateTime

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

perl-5.10.0-4 -> perl-5.10.0-5 site_perl update needed

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

"my $foo = "bar" if $baz;"

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

Changes in "m//m" in 5.10

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

"shift->(@_)" doesn't do the same as "&{+shift}"

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

Perl Benchmark Suite

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

formats, and "write.t"'s sensitivity

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

"Data::Dumper" patch

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

The "assert()"ions in "sv_chop()" and the passed-in pointer

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

perl cross compilation for at91sam9260

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

"integer.pm" - behaviour v documentation

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

Problem in "Exporter"

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

TODO of the week

Patches of Interest

test.pl fix

  In the previous weeks it came to pass that Jerry D. Hedden started
  working on 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

watchdog() some IO tests

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

threads::shared 1.25

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

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

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

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

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

threads::shared 1.25

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

Correction to change 34138

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

New and old bugs from RT

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 "open" by ignoring the shellish nature of such characters
  as "<", ">" and "|". 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

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

  Bram wanted to know if the problem was caused by defining
  "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

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

Bug fix in "malloc.c" (#50856)

  Mark Noyes filled in details about this problem, where it transpires
  that different parts of a program are calling Perl's "malloc" and the
  underlying libc "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

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

  Yves Orton grudgingly admitted that it adding a modifier to a pattern,
  such as "/$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

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

  Yves Orton suggested if that someone could isolate the regular
  expression in the "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

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

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

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

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

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 "charnames" was being descoped.

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

"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

"pad_alloc" and "fold_constants" are not members of public API (#56536)

  Dmitry Karasik wanted to build "B::Generate" on MSWin32, but the above
  two API functions need to go public. Rafaël agreed to letting
  "fold_constants" out into the light, but declined "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

5.10.0 crash on serialised v-strings (#56606)

  John Peacock got to work to fix "Data::Dumper" breakage when
  serialising with version objects. Due to the incestuous nature of
  "CPAN.pm", the core and the duality of "version.pm", he faced
  considerable difficulty in getting the change to be heeded. In the end
  he tracked down the CPAN authors who use "Data::Dumper" to serialise
  version numbers (in 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

"Math::BigInt" gives completely (bogus results) when "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

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

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

using $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

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

  Serge discovered that "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 $^N and $1 disagreed about what had
  just been matched. Yves Orton pointed out that as the match used a
  quantified capture buffer (as in "/(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

5.10.0 "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

\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

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

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

Taint bug with "\G" and "pos()" on hash entries (#56842)

  Matt Sergeant found another bug where "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

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

  Trying to drop a "v1:" as target for a "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

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

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

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

This is the BBC

  *

New Core Modules

  *

In Brief

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

About this summary

  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 or attending a YAPC to help support the development of
  Perl.