This Week on perl5-porters (22-28 March 2004)

 From the world renowned center of reality, comes this week's Perl 5 Porters
Weekly Review.  After enjoying free pastry way too much at the 100 year
anniversary of the local bakery, this summary should be a light meal to
prepare.


More info on undefined warnings

  Dave Mitchell reported that he was working on a patch that would refine the
  warning for using undefined values, by adding variable name, and even better,
  which hash key or array index contained the undef value.  His worry was that
  it might be a security hole.  Reference was made to the recent changes in
  Apache log handling (where newlines are now escaped).  The consensus seemed
  to be that it was ok to show as much as possible, as long as the output was
  sanitized, and possibly should be UTF-8 aware.

  http://groups.google.com/groups?th=74bb3a81236c4928


What version are you?

  Stas Bekman asked for a way to find out whether a module is available in a
  specific version _without_ actually loading it.  Rafael suggested
  ExtUtils::MM_Unix->parse_version, Merijn came up with "V", which oddly enough,
  does _not_ live on CPAN.  Anyways, the original question turned into several
  issues related to taint and whether or not it is save to execute a part of a
  file which you would otherwise require.

  http://groups.google.com/groups?th=7aed3c0739a668a
  http://search.cpan.org/~mschwern/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/
  http://www.test-smoke.org/perl/noncpan.shtml


UNIVERSAL::VERSION broken?

Stas was busy this week.  A bug report about UNIVERSAL::VERSION being broken
in 5.9.x opened the can of worms yet again that is consistent version checking
in different versions of Perl.  What generated this, was a bug report to the
mod_perl 2 list which stated version 3.40 of CGI had been used.  This caused
Stas to lose some hair.  John Peacock explained why this may have been
confusing, but still technically correct.  And in the end, there was a patch
that will hopefully wind up on CPAN soon.

  http://groups.google.com/groups?th=f15911eb2e696379
  http://search.cpan.org/~jpeacock/version/


Enhancing Hash::Util

  Yves Orton sollicited comments about additional features for Hash::Util,
  specifically related to locked hashes.  Some nice new features were suggested
  and of course, one should have a look at Yves' Data::Dump::Streamer module.

  http://groups.google.com/groups?th=c9e0ec38159844a
  http://search.cpan.org/~yves/Data-Dump-Streamer/


Perl 5.8.4-RC1-tobesomedaybutnotjustnow

  Nicholas Clark released a 5.8.4 snapshot for all of you to test.  The code
  freeze for 5.8.4 is at March 31, 23:59:59 GMT, which is _one_ second before
  April 1st.  But I'm sure Nick means business when he says nothing will go in
  after that.  Quickly scanning through the changelog, reveals that 5.8.4 will
  have stacked filetest operators, fixes to Storable, Math::BigInt, a speedup
  for Unicode case mapping and many, many other fixes and documentation updates.

  http://groups.google.com/groups?th=556d9f7d2566cf9e
  http://opensource.fotango.com/perl/perl-22588.tar.bz2


In brief:

  Some spam seeped through to the list this week.  Thanks again to all of
  the good folks who manage to keep the barrage of virus infested mail from the
  list the rest of the time!

  Many bug reports were made, and some of them were quickly resolved or at
  least acknowledged.  But as Robert Spier mentioned two weeks ago, the number
  of open tickets is still increasing.  So if you feel so inclined, please have
  a look at the open tickets and help the perl5 porters by aiding in resolving
  the open issues at hand.


About this summary

  This summary was written by Elizabeth Mattijsen, from Echt, The Netherlands
  while Rafael is getting settled in Paris. Weekly summaries are published on
  http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which subscription address
  is [email protected].  Comments and corrections are welcome.