This Week on perl5-porters (8-14 September 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (8-14 September 2003)
  Any busy week for the porters, ends with a busy week-end for the
  summarizer (old saying). Your traditional weekly summary is out, and
  many subjects of interest are featured inside.

About hash randomization
  Elizabeth Mattijsen asks for a way to know whether hash seed
  randomization is in effect or not in perl 5.8.1 or above.

  A first hint is to look at the Config variable $Config{ccflags} to see
  whether -DNO_HASH_SEED has been specified or not, indicating whether
  perl's support for random hash seeding is turned on. But there's also a
  runtime setting involved, the PERL_HASH_SEED environment variable ;
  and Config is not intended to store settings that vary at runtime.
  Finally, Jarkko Hietaniemi added a function hash_seed() to the core
  module Hash::Util, that returns the seed, (and consequently 0 when no
  seed is used.)

  The discussion then digresses about ways to make Config.pm or
  charnames.pm lighter.

      http://xrl.us/str

Reducing memory footprint
  Talking about making modules lighter, Elizabeth submitted several
  patches to reduce the memory usage of some heavy modules, ("Config" and
  "warnings"), when used in a multithreaded perl application. She achieved
  this by replacing some carefully chosen lexical variables by global
  variables declared with the :unique attribute, so they're shared
  between threads.

  But Liz' patch to "warnings" uncovered a bug, by an amusing side-effect
  (it triggerred a failure in the regression test for O.pm) : in a perl
  interpreter configured without threads, declaring a variable with the
  :unique attribute loads the "attributes" module, which shouldn't be
  necessary for built-in attributes. This was fixed by Rafael, just in
  time for the 5.8.1 code freeze.

Testing the debugger
  The regression tests that Andreas Koenig wrote for the debugger last
  week were proven to be rather unportable, as multiple test failures
  showing up in the smoke matrices demonstrated. Jarkko retracted them,
  waiting for the debugger to be made more testable (e.g. by making it
  able to read commands from a file, and write output to another file.)
  And he added, half jokingly : "if someone desperately needs a hobby, for
  5.10 I would suggest a mad^Wambitious project of rewriting the debugger
  from scratch".

      http://xrl.us/tdp
      http://xrl.us/tdq

The hard job of porting
  Some of the smoke tests on Cygwin were showing alarming failures lately.
  They're difficult to trace, because, as Jarkko says, "the configurations
  people have vary a lot, and what works over here won't work over there,
  and vice versa..." Radu Greab finally found that the blame was to be put
  on a bug in getpwuid_r() in the latest Cygwin (1.5.3-1). Jarkko then
  checked in gratefully Radu's patch, labelling it as "Radu Greab is my
  hero."

The word on order of evaluation
  Smylers usefully pointed at a statement by Larry that clarifies the
  position of Perl 5 and Perl 6 about the definedness of evalution order
  of complex expressions, that was discussed lask week :

      http://xrl.us/tdr

is_deeply()
  There was some discussion about the proper semantics of
  Test::More::is_deeply() between Fergal Daly and Tony Bowden, that
  spawned several mailing lists (p5p, code-review-ladder and perl-qa so
  far.) Should it ignore the packages the references might have been
  blessed into ? Should it do it even when those packages overload
  operators that may have influenced the comparison routines ? What is the
  final and definitive answer ?

      http://xrl.us/tds

In Brief
  Peter Prymmer is working on the portability of perl on VMS. Notably he
  was sorting out with Ken Williams what should be the policy of
  File::Spec regarding operating systems where filesystems use volume
  names. Ken released new alpha versions of File::Spec. See for example :

      http://xrl.us/teh

  Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan discusses about possible optimizations on regular
  expressions that begin with a atom that potentially matches the null
  string, such as /\s*,\s*/.

      http://xrl.us/tdt

  Jos Boumans remarks that perl accepts to run a directory, sort of.

      http://xrl.us/teg

  Abigail reports bug #23790, about foreach() being unable to iterate
  correctly over a list returned by a lvalue subroutine.

  Redvers Davies is interested in updating the minimal files that are
  absolutely needed to get a core perl compiled and running. He needs this
  information to release packages for the Zaurus. (The list can be found
  at the end of the INSTALL document.)

  John Peacock released version.pm version 0.32.

About this summary
  This week's summary was crafted by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries are
  published weekly on http://use.perl.org/ and on a mailing list, which
  subscription address is [email protected]. Corrections
  and comments are welcome.