perl589delta race!unless(...) terser than if(!...)Test::Harness prove.t failures-Dusemymalloc fails on t/comp/hints.t$VERSION in OpcodeTest::Smoke improvements for Windowselsifpod2man and POD errors (cpan #39007)perltodo#if/#endif in Win64 configuration.$ENV{TEST_JOBS} vs $ENV{HARNESS_OPTIONS}multipart_init() incorrectly quotes other headers (#33118)CGI::Pretty dies in ->new (#41572)$! (#43097)o warn=0 die=0 ignored (#57016)Unicode::UCD::casefold() does not work as documented (#58430)encoding pragma has triplicated section (#58774)
"A string in Perl is a sequence of arbitrarily large integers. If they are all < 256, then you can store them all in bytes, so you can use a sequence of bytes. If some of them of them are > 255, then you need a representation that allows storing such values, and a byte string is not enough. In that case, Perl stores a sequence of variable-width values encoded according to the rules of UTF-8." -- Aristotle Pagaltzis, making it seem so simple.
perl589delta race!Paul Fencwick has put together a mailing list, RSS feeds, a repository and more for people wishing to help write the document describing the changes in perl 5.8.9. Most importantly, he wrote a micro HOWTO to show people how they could get involved (and no, you don't need to read p5p, nor this summary in order to help).
no more excuses http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00204.html
In a related note, Andy Dougherty expunged the INSTALL file of references to 5.10.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00245.html
Heiko Eißfeldt didn't like the way the perl debugger doesn't know how
to leap over entire map or grep blocks in a single leap when using
the 'n' command. In fact it was enough to make Heiko to make the debugger
Do The Right Thing, and proposed a patch for review. Joshua ben Jore
offered some good advice for making things more robust, especially when
taking error handling into account.
source perlmonks thread http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=709679
richard foley offers encouragement http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00191.html
unless(...) terser than if(!...)In response to Graham Barr's counter-example using overloading that
showed then if(!$foo) is not equivalent to unless($foo), Nicholas
Clark commented that this was sufficient reason not to integrate the
change into a minor release, as there may be code out there that relies
on an overloaded variable being true and false at the same time.
On the other hand, the concept is so demented that he had no qualms in breaking it for a major release.
another obfu bites the dust, hep hep http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00194.html
Steve Hay bemoaned the fact that the unless/!if optimisation blew
away his Win32API::File smokes. Vincent Pit realised that he had
failed to make allowance for chained nots, as in 1 if !$x or !$y
or !$z, since that exceeded the size of the opcode stream that the
peephole optimizer was able to consider. And, bad luck, such a
code path was tweaked in test.pl itself. (Hint: we need some
absurd chains of conditional tests somewhere in the test suite).
Nevertheless, according to the theory that being able to describe the bug means you're able to fix it, Vincent proposed a second patch that nullifies the ops rather than trying to surgically remove them.
no ops bad, null ops good http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00220.html
J. Adams was suffering in the attempt to build an ancient version of Storable (2.15) on a brand new 5.10 perl. Nicholas Clark asked if this was really necessary, since the current 2.18 is so much nicer. J. replied that yes, it was vital, since other machines in the network with older versions of Storable were digesting the output and would fail if they encountered Storable files from the future.
Nicholas sketched out what brain transplant surgery would be required in order to get things to work. We may assume that J. succeeded in getting things to work.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00235.html
Test::Harness prove.t failuresSteve Hay discovered that all his smoke tests were failing simply
because he had set the HARNESS_TIMER environment variable to 1.
Nicholas Clark stole some code from Andy Lester's upstream
Test::Harness repository that he hoped would address the problem.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00255.html
-Dusemymalloc fails on t/comp/hints.tVincent Pit noticed that blead is now failing in the above test file
but had no idea since when. A little detective work led him to conclude
that it was a question of underlying C structs that were running
into a problem of overlapping copies. While neither Rafaël
Garcia-Suarez nor Nicholas were able to reproduce the error, Vincent's
patch seemed sane enough to apply.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00259.html
(Best. Subject. Line. Ever.)
Ricardo Signes joined a long list of illustrious Perl hackers in
experiencing the pain of UTF-8, and suggesting a set of guidelines
for dealing with it. Aristotle Pagaltzis laid it out in crystal
clear terms (see the top of this article). Glenn Linderman tweaked
Aristotle's looser prose and both of them recommended Juerd
Waalboer's BLOB CPAN module that helps in times like these.
More advice from Glen Lindemann:
Using the utf8 flag to make decisions about how to process character data is inappropriate.
Using the utf8 flag to determine if it is character data or not is inappropriate.
So don't do that.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00262.html
Michael G. Schwern is dragging Perl kicking and screaming into the mid 21st century, so that date arithmetic in the years 2039 and beyond won't collapse in a screaming heap on Unix systems. People with more C expertise than Michael are invited to join in the fun on the Google Code project that hosts the code that deals with this.
your children will be grateful http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00285.html
Michael had so much fun with 2038 and git branching that he went ahead and produced a git branch for grafting 2038+ date arithmetic onto blead.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00314.html
In the process of dealing with time values larger than 32 bits, Michael
wondered about scalar upgrades that go from signed to unsigned int
and thence to double, and whether it would be worth slotting a 64-bit
long long in there somewhere.
Joshua Hoblitt suggested the Utopian int to long long to Math::BigInt.
Tels, as author and maintainer of Math::BigInt pointed out that he
had collected various ideas and techniques over the years to rewrite it
in C, but said that this would take hundreds of hours and he didn't see
how the effort could be financed, short of winning the lottery.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00309.html
$VERSION in OpcodeNicholas Clark wondered how one should deal with different versions of Opcode
living on CPAN (insofar as it is published with each released version of Perl)
whilst avoiding "I must upgrade your perl" arms race when someone attempts to
upgrade it.
Rafaël thought it was pretty much a non-issue, given that Opcode is so
intimately tied to the particular perl release (unlike Safe which is
dual-life-clean), it cannot reasonably be upgraded. In light of this, its
version number is nearly meaningless. Nicholas wondered if a "1.06_01"
scheme could work.
Zefram recalled problems with Module::Build in the light of such
version numbers, but John Peacock thought that Module::Build no
long had any issues relating to development release numbering schemes.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00294.html
Test::Smoke improvements for WindowsJan Dubois, answering Steve Hay's question as to why his smokes spewed so many warnings, said that the main problem is that the smoke in question is on a 64-bit platform, even though there's precious little in the output to distinguish it from a 32-bit build.
The warnings arise from the fact that Perl's internals are not 64-bit
clean at all. Variables are defined as I32 (32 bits in length) and get
assigned size_t values (which are indeed 64 bits in length on 64-bit
platforms), plus many other assorted programming sins.
Other 64-bit platforms are more or less immune to such problems as
everything is 64 bits. Windows is singular in its approach, with
ints and longs being 32 bits when IVs and pointers are
64 bits. Jan had tried to clean this up once, but wound up converting
just about every single I32 into an IV.
Andy Dougherty felt his pain, having undertaken the same task himself
in days gone past. After having battled to resolve the contradictions
between perl's own internals use of an int, and what the C library
wants to see in terms of int, each time Andy found something
much easier to do, like rewriting Perl's Unicode handling on EBCDIC.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00295.html
elsifAlexey Tourbin uncovered a flaw in the plan to fix the longstanding
"wrong line number reported for elsif" bug. Nicholas understood
why it was going wrong, but professed lack of knowledge to figure
out how the optree and peephole optimiser work.
Vincent Pit proposed a fairly ambitious patch to blead that fixed this issue which Rafaël applied to blead. At the same time, Rafaël also thought that the original patch was too dangerous to go into the 5.8 track at least in its current state and it being so close to the 5.8.9 release. Nicholas concurred, and backed the change out.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00301.html
Nicholas Clark related the story of Tim Bunce profiling PPI with
Devel::NYTProf, and discovering that PPI spends 15% of its
time living in UNIVERSAL::isa.
So he replaced an @ISA linear scan with a hash lookup. And then
he wondered why he observed only a 1% speed improvement. Michael
G. Schwern thought that the problem was probably not so much @ISA
traversals something going on in isa_lookup, which contains a
lot of code.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00306.html
pod2man and POD errors (cpan #39007)Russ Allbery asked what the porters thought of changing pod2man's error
handling to emit errors to stderr, rather than building a POD ERRORS
section in the document. He listed the pros and cons of each approach.
Alan D. Salewski voted for stderr, Zefram suggested an option to die()
on error.
podchecker anyone? http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00330.html
Here we go, this is easy. Fame, fortune, it's all yours.
pod/checkpods.PL (and make check in the pod/ subdirectory)
implements a very basic check for pod files, but the errors it discovers
aren't found by podchecker. Add this check to podchecker, get rid of
checkpods and have make check use podchecker.
perltodoWhen looking for the TODO of the week a couple of weeks ago, several proof-readers pointed out the POD formatting errors in the TODO section. As it was a direct steal from perltodo.pod, I sent in a patch to fix it up. But of course Nicholas Clark did a much better job of it.
fwp -- fun with pod http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00183.html
#if/#endif in Win64 configuration.Jan Dubois suspected that change #33350 was responsible for deleting an
#ifdef from a Windows header file. So he put it back, and Rafaël applied
the change.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00189.html
$ENV{TEST_JOBS} vs $ENV{HARNESS_OPTIONS}Bram dug down to the bottom of a problem with the new test harness running tests in parallel and having some tests fail because they are not yet parallel-safe.
He thought that the problem was that Tap::Harness was not running
certain tests serially because of interactions between two environment
variables that govern the harness. So he wrote a patch to get the test suite
testing without error, which seemed good enough for Rafaël to apply.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00199.html
Vadim Konovalov delivered a first patch, to Makefile.SH, in hopefully what will be a series, to get cross compilation working. The result of the patch is a new Makefile target which can then be used to kick off the compilation. Rafaël seemed pleased.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00200.html
Jerry D. Hedden identified lib/charnames.t, lib/strict.t and lib/subs.t as badly behaved citizens in the brave new world of parallel testing, so he adjusted them to use the officially sanctioned temporary file name generation technique.
the prognosis is grim http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00251.html
conform or die http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00253.html
multipart_init() incorrectly quotes other headers (#33118)Steve Peters filed a bug in 2004 concerning a problem that the Bugzilla project had uncovered with the venerable CGI.pm.
Renée Bäcker wrote a patch to address the problem, but it broke the test suite. In the time it took him rework the patch, Lincoln Stein had already fixed it in his upstream repository.
While this was happening Nicholas Clark piped up to get the attribution of another Windows patch from Steve Hay sorted out in the credits. Craig A. Berry also confirmed that the VMS patches that Lincoln had integrated blindly did in fact result in a clean test run for VMS.
3.42 is gold https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=275108 http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00211.html
CGI::Pretty dies in ->new (#41572)Nicholas Clark noted with satisfaction that as of CGI version 3.42, the blead and CPAN versions are byte-for-byte identical. The only scheduled change planned in blead is simply the architectural issues involved in placing the CGI build directory under ext/, which should not affect the source.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00224.html
$! (#43097)Christoph Bussenius wrote a patch to fix this problem, which simply clears the error flag on the file descriptor each time it's called.
Gisle Aas pointed out the flaw in the plan. Christoph took another stab
at solving the problem, but realised that with a global $!, there's
not much chance at developing a robust solution. What's needed is a $!
for each file handle.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00216.html
o warn=0 die=0 ignored (#57016)Tye McQueen reported that, following a refactoring of the debugger that assigned
the functionality of O to o, the above debugger command no longer did
anything useful. He restored the previous behaviour (or some sort of useful
behaviour) in a patch, which Rafaël Garcia-Suarez applied.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00197.html
Unicode::UCD::casefold() does not work as documented (#58430)In response to Karl Williamson's description of the possible options available to him to solve the problem of Unicode case folding, David Landgren offered a couple of suggestions.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00226.html
As Karl kept looking at the Unicode problems, he discovered that the
mktables program, which generates the Unicode tables that the core
will use afterwards, is looking for things in a file that Karl points
out do not exist. He wasn't sure whether the code is just utterly wrong,
or whether the Unicode Consortium changed the contents of the file
at some point. Either way, something needs to be done about it.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00215.html
encoding pragma has triplicated section (#58774)Darren Duncan suggests that of the three "Side effects" section in the documentation, only one is needed.
do not operate heavy machinery http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00302.html
G. Harders reported a problem building NDBM on AIX. Unfortunately, all the sympathetic AIX hackers were busy doing other things.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00316.html
The problem is that Test::Harness is looking for, and failing to find
Time::HiRes.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00327.html
264 new + 1032 open = 1296 (+8 -5) http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00218.html http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
Time::HiRes with perl 5.8.8 on a justifiably ancient Solaris 2.6
host. Steve Peters was more impressed by the fact that such an old
operating system was able to build a recent Perl with no more errors
than that.teaching an old dog new tricks http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00230.html
Richard Srisamang mulled over a Storable problem, whereby a
data structure is read in, the structure acquires additional elements
and then is written out... and the new file is smaller than the
original file. Nicholas Clark suggested viewing the results in a
human-readable format, such as XML (sniggering not allowed) or
Data::Dumper.
sounds like a feature http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00260.html
Tom "spot" Callaway is desperately seeking Rob Brown (BBB on CPAN). It's a question of licensing code on CPAN with respect to Fedora.
licensing issues, yummy yummy! http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00272.html
Gábor Szabó is clearly mad, since he's building a GUI front-end to run debugger sessions over a network link.
and looking for a name http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00328.html
Where it is given thanks for the work of Bram and Renée Bäcker in reducing the bug count by several hundred over the summer.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00190.html
No comments.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2008-09/msg00332.html
This summary was written by David Landgren.
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