Perl 5 Porters Mailing List Summary: October 27th - November 1st

                          October 27th - November 1st

Updates

   Perl 5.22.1-RC1 is now [1]available. Thanks to Steve Hay for the work!

     In the deepest rocky crevice A will-o'-the wisp lured me; How I coul=
d
     find my way from here, For me it's easy memory!

     For I am used to straying ways, Every path to th'end a way, All our
joys
     and all our suffering,-- To a will-o'-the wisp it 's all play!

     Through the dried-up bed of torrents I quite calmly downward stroll;
     Every stream its sea will enter, Every suffering finds its goal!

     -- Wilhelm M=C3=BCller, trans. Anon., "Will-o'-the Wisp" (No. 9 in
Schubert's
     song-cycle, "Winterreise")

   More agreement with Karl Williamson's suggestion to include fixes to
   \s{wb} and \s{sb} in perl 5.22.1, but due to performance hit concerns
   raised by Yves Orton, it was left out of 5.22.1.

   Bulk88 offered an updated patch for Win32 parallel builds in [2]Perl
   #126452, which was merged.

   Jarkko Hietaniemi resolved a few older IRIX compilation tickets
(mentioned
   below).

   Tony Cook provided a solution for some Coverity issues (mentioned last
   week) Jarkko has been working through.

   Dave Mitchell has another [3]grant report for us. Dave continued worki=
ng
   on the context stack, but also took a break to see about optimizing so=
me
   arithmetic operations, making the nbody benchmarks (focusing heavily o=
n
   floating point vector arithmetic) about a third faster. Great news!
Bulk88
   provided several improvement points to the code which Dave had created
   another branch for.

   Matthew Horsfall suggests the problem in [4]Perl #126070 is likely to =
be
   with [5]TryCatch.

   Aaron Crane provides insight in [6]Perl #126170 on BEGIN blocks with
   subroutine attributes.

Bugs

  Reported bugs

   [7]Perl #126480, reported by Dan Collins, shows an assertion failure w=
ith
   the code:

 pipe$$5,0

   [8]Perl #126482, reported by Dan, shows another assertion failure
with the
   code:

 sub(){sub ub(){0}ub ub

   [9]Perl #126481, reported by Dan, is one more assertion failure with t=
he
   code:

 0=3D/(?[!!(\w])/

   Which had been fixed the next day by Karl Williamson.

   [10]Perl #126469, reported by Ben Bullock, asks to document the second
   argument of sv_reftype. Patches by Tony Cook added.

   [11]Perl #126474, reported by Kazuho Oku, mentions that unsafe signal
   handlers use newSVsv, thus calling malloc. He opened the bug since per=
l
   5.17 introduces this call at all times, which wasn't the case prior.

   [12]Perl #126484, reported by Andreas J. Koening, mentions that perl
   5.23.3 breaks [13]Lexical::SealRequireHints.

   [14]Perl #126472, also reported by Andreas, shows a problem in 5.23.3
   breaking additional modules which run very explicit checks for a behav=
ior
   which does not break the module, but the specific test. Dave Mitchell
   advised updating the test.

   [15]Perl #126502, reported by masterchiefaragorn, shows that once you
   freeze and thaw floating point numbers using [16]Storable they will no
   longer be equal using =3D=3D. Zefram explains in the ticket why this h=
appens.

   [17]Perl #126515, reported by John Imrie, regarding the missing Unicod=
e
   character Block=3DCJK_Unified_Ideograph. This was the wrong name and i=
t
only
   came up as an error now since Karl Williamson added a compile-time che=
ck
   for for valid Unicode properties.

  Resolved bugs

     * [18]Perl #125298: warnings.t one failure in IRIX 6.5.
     * [19]Perl #126453: Don't distribute version::vpp/EUMM::version::vpp=
.
     * [20]Perl #116062: Installing perl 5.16.2 in SGI IRIX 6.2.
     * [21]Perl #39797: Unable to build Perl under IRIX with -Duseshrplib=
.
     * [22]Perl #125314: Configuring with Accflags DAPPLLIB_EXP broke in
       5.22.0.
     * [23]Perl #126468: (Duplicate of [Perl #125314].)
     * [24]Perl #126309: x operator on list causes segfault, confuses
       valgrind (64-bit).
     * [25]Perl #126481: Assert fail with 0=3D/(?[!!(\w])/
     * [26]Perl #124212: porting/extrefs.t fails in tru64.

Discussion

   More conversation happening in [27]Perl #126414 about number rounding =
in
   perl (mentioned last week). Tony Cook suggests using EOVERFLOW (as bot=
h
   Solaris and FreeBSD do) and to warn if the value of inodes changes
because
   of rounding. Aristotle Pagaltzis supports stringifying and Bulk88
notes it
   might be the only way to handle 128 bit inodes.

   Ricardo Signes [28]suggests opening a meta ticket in order to track al=
l
   the fuzzer-related bugs. Dan Collins wants a way to triage the
tickets and
   have multiple users be able to edit them, even if only a spreadsheet.

   Paul "LeoNerd" Evans [29]wonders if it's possible to warn about POD
in the
   middle of an expression. Unfortunately, as shown by Eric Brine and
   H.Merijn "Tux" Brand, it's a problematic idea, partly because of
functions
   and partly because of indirect notation support.

   The discussion on optimizing read (mentioned last week) in [30]Perl
   #126403 is continuing. Craig A. Berry wonders whether the suggested
   solutions really speed things up. Apparently on GNU/Linux and Macs (or
   more accurately, non-Windows) it does. Craig will try to provide a cle=
an
   patch, but no promises on when.

   Bulk88 is continuing work on cleaning up dependencies on having
DynaLoader
   available for miniperl. He [31]wrote about his plan, then [32]wrote mo=
re
   verbosely on his journey down the rabbit-hole. [33]Perl #126533 and
   [34]Perl #126534 are the result of his work, provided as patches.

   Karl Williamson [35]continues his research and possible solution
   suggestions on handling Unicode characters beyond 72-bits (past 0xFF).

References

   1. http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/232321
   2. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126452
   3. http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/232244
   4. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126070
   5. https://metacpan.org/pod/TryCatch
   6. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126170
   7. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126480
   8. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126482
   9. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126481
  10. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126469
  11. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126474
  12. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126484
  13. https://metacpan.org/pod/Lexical/SealRequireHints
  14. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126472
  15. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126502
  16. https://metacpan.org/pod/Storable
  17. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126515
  18. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D125298
  19. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126453
  20. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D116062
  21. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D39797
  22. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D125314
  23. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126468
  24. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126309
  25. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126481
  26. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D124212
  27. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126414
  28. http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/232223
  29. http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/232245
  30. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126403
  31. http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/232207
  32. http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/232296
  33. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126533
  34. https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3D126534
  35. http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/232262