This Week on perl5-porters (9-15 September 2002)

This Week on perl5-porters (9-15 September 2002)
  This was not a very busy week, with people packing for YAPC::Europe, and
  all that... Nevertheless, the smoke tests were running, the bug reports
  were flying, and an appropriate amount of patches were sent. Read about
  printf formats, serialized tied thingies, built-in leak testing, syntax
  oddities, et alii.

printf format documentation
  Allen Smith pointed out (in bug report #17075) that the documentation
  for printf in perlfunc is innaccurate regarding the %g and %G format
  specifiers. In fact, the thread goes through commentary of the C
  standard, and its implementation (or should I say interpretation) on
  various platforms (e.g. the availability of the "long long" type).

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-17075-36916.14.3025032754936%40bugs6.perl.org

Data::Dumper and tied objects
  Slaven Rezic asked whether Data::Dumper should support tied objects.
  Brian Ingerson answered that no, his opinion is that the tiedness should
  lay outside of serialization.

  Slaven also provided a new test file for Data::Dumper, containing some
  TODO tests for a bug he just found. Apparently this is a rather obscure
  bug, which *seems only be triggered if Freeze/Thaw is used in the pure
  perl version of Dump (Dumpxs works fine) and the object type changes.*

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=200209091755.g89HthuZ019314%40vran.herceg.de
      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=200209091933.g89JX8vS022479%40vran.herceg.de

"-DLEAKTEST" doesn't work
  It has been reported (bug #17197) that perl 5.8.0 cannot be built with
  threads and with the CPP symbol "LEAKTEST" (once referred to in
  perlrun.) Andy Dougherty mentioned that *LEAKTEST didn't really work in
  any case, and has not really been supported since before version 5.000.*
  Nick Ing-Simmons and H.Merijn Brand voted for its removal.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-17197-37307.7.03322615920982%40bugs6.perl.org

Testing for magic
  The discussion on v-strings from the previous week continued. The new
  v-strings, if you don't remember, are scalars with 'V'-magic attached to
  them. So, to test whether a given scalar is a v-string, we should test
  whether it has 'V' magic. It's possible with XS or by using the B
  module, but that's not actually very straightforward, so John Peacock
  proposed a patch to add a function isvstring() to Scalar::Util.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020911123320.J2793%40dansat.data-plan.com

Syntax incompatibility with the "//" operator
  Rafael Garcia-Suarez found that

      sub f ($) { } f $x / 2;

  wasn't anymore accepted by bleadperl. This was due to a parsing
  incompatibility introduced by the new "//" operator. This was corrected,
  but the following construct is still a syntax error with bleadperl :

      print $fh //;

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020912151731.1076c91b.rgarcia%40hexaflux.com

In brief
  After some gcc-ism being tracked down, ANSI C compilers are now able to
  compile Nicholas Clark's copy-on-write code.

  H.Merijn Brand has now write access to the Perforce repository where the
  source for bleadperl is kept.

  Josh b Jore noticed (bug #17088) that once a scalar variable is
  local()ised, its pos() is lost.

  Perl 5.8.0 can't be built on NetBSD/alpha with an older gcc, due to a
  bug in gcc's optimizer. The fix is to pick up a newest compiler, or to
  compile without optimization. Jarkko Hietaniemi provided a patch to the
  hintsfile for NetBSD to check this. (Bug #17174.)

  chromatic proposed a patch that reimplements AutoLoader::import() to
  avoid a dependency on the Exporter module. Not applied, it was flawed.
  So he proposed a second (better) patch, that waits for its turn in the
  queue.

  Alain Barbet provided a impressive stack of smoke tests (various
  combinations of Cygwin, Solaris, Linux, *BSD, on Sparc, PPC and x86!)

  Following a bug report (#17208) by Vincent Lefevre to fix small typos in
  the perlmodlib man page, I found that it included an incomplete list of
  modules. Fixed.

  "Cwd::chdir('.')" apparently hangs on Solaris. Bug #17227, reported by
  Akim Demaille, and on which nobody commented.

  Brian Korver reported that the alarm() system call is broken with perl
  5.8.0, at least on FreeBSD, when mixed with the gethostbyname() system
  call. See bug #17341. This is probably caused by the new safe signals in
  perl 5.8.0 (see the corresponding entry in perldelta).

About this summary
  This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. It's also available
  via a mailing list, which subscription address is
  [email protected]. Comments, additions and
  low-temperature flames welcome.