Re: File::Copy, autodie, VMS (was Re: maint-5.10-1531-ga5f97a6 on VMS status)

On the current plan of just fixing up the test skippage (which seems  
quite reasonable to me):

On Jul 8, 2009, at 10:03 AM, Paul Fenwick wrote:

> Dave Mitchell wrote:
>
>>> Thanks, Paul.  That would be ok with me for 5.10.1, and I think  
>>> would
>>> just mean adding a clause to the Windows skippage that's already  
>>> there.
>>
>> For 5.10.1, that sounds like the lowest risk option.
>
> Done on my local autodie repo, with pushes to github and patches to  
> Perl
> soon.  I can push a new release of autodie to the CPAN if that's  
> likely to
> make VMS folks happy.

I'm already happy :-).  But it would probably make Dave happy to have  
what's in CPAN match identically what's in 5.10.1.  Sorry for the  
extra churn, and sorry not to have spotted this earlier and saved you  
the trouble.  Plus I hate to see people get punished for reading the  
docs :-(.

> However, it should be noted that the skip-list explicitly tests for  
> 5.10.0
> and earlier.

And by now you've likely noted that my patch elsewhere in this thread  
mucks that up slightly by making 5.10.1 the dividing point for Windows  
and 5.10.2 for VMS, when it now looks as though it should be 5.10.2  
for both if I've understood you correctly.

> If for any reason we don't go with the fix which is currently in  
> blead, then
> I think we should consider fixing the docs so that rather than  
> File::Copy
> saying it returns zero, it instead says that it returns false.


The docs have been that way for at least fourteen years.  I have a  
suspicion that they were true when written but that somewhere along  
the way we started getting what's in the PV slot of PL_sv_no rather  
than what's in the IV slot (it has a perfectly good 0 in its IV slot,  
0.0 in its NV slot, but for some reason the return from syscopy gives  
us the "" in its PV slot).  If that is what happened, it happened  
before 5.8.4 (the oldest thing I have handy to test with).  So there  
are things to chase down in the 5.10.2 era, but for now we must plug  
our ears to its siren song and get 5.10.1 finished up.
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:[email protected]

"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
  difficult than getting in."
                  Brad Leithauser