RE: [MP2] Nullav undeclared make error

Fred Moyer wrote on 2012-07-18:
> On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 2:02 AM, Steve Hay
<[email protected]>
> wrote:
>> 
>> I've now eliminated our uses of deprecated core perl symbols in
> commits 1362399, 1362409 and 1362414, although we'll need to update
> Apache-Test in mod_perl to get the commit which touched that.
> 
> What update needs to happen to Apache-Test? If you want to make the
> needed commit I can start the release process.

All the necessary commits are in. Commit 1362414 updated Apache-Test, so
I'm guessing we need to roll Apache-Test-1.38, and then update mod_perl
to include that to get that commit into a mod_perl release?


> 
>> This gets mod_perl building again with a perl that doesn't have large
>> files support.
>> 
>> I still think we should also remove our usage of PERL_CORE, though...
> 
> Does this affect the minimum version of Perl we can support? I
> remember from the last mp2 release that there was a file with
> httpd/perl dependencies in it that I had to update.

It shouldn't affect it. I did briefly break the build for 5.10.1 by
having used a new symbol which older perls don't have, but the buildbot
told me about that and I fixed it in commit 1362409. I will test with
5.8 to be sure when I get a chance, but generally the changes were to
use NULL (rather than Nullsv et al ) a lot, so won't have any issues for
older perls.

You could start the ball rolling with a new Apache-Test release in the
meantime, though: that only contained one Nullsv->NULL change, so
definitely isn't a problem.

Btw, did we get anywhere with granting PAUSE perms to other committers?


> 
> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> From: Steve Hay [mailto:[email protected]]
>> Sent: 13 July 2012 08:23
>> To: Fred Moyer
>> Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]; mod_perl Dev
>> Subject: Re: [MP2] Nullav undeclared make error
>> 
>> Various perl changes removed Nullsv, Nullav etc from the core (e.g.
> see 24792b8dab and 3ae1b22641), but left definitions of them for when
> PERL_CORE is not defined, for backwards compatibility with all those
> CPAN modules out there which use them.
>> 
>> The problem here is what Nick hinted at in his comment for
>> 24792b8dab,
> namely that "obviously" nobody outside of the perl core is defining
> PERL_CORE... It's a rather too common and surely always wrong thing to
> do that, and we're guilty of it ourselves: modperl_perl_includes.h
> defines PERL_CORE as some kind of optimization, but only when
> USE_ITHREADS is defined and USE_LARGE_FILES is not. That's not a
> common configuration, hence we haven't seen this happen before, but
> the last line which I've quoted below does indeed undefine large file
> support, hence PERL_CORE gets defined and the definitions of Nullsv,
> Nullav etc are not provided.
>> 
>> I replaced all uses of Nullxx with (XX*)NULL in my modules some time
> ago in the belief that if it was good for the core then it was good
> for me, so I will do likewise for mod_perl unless anyone objects (or
> beats me to it).
>>