These Weeks on perl5-porters (12-25 July 2004)

These Weeks on perl5-porters (12-25 July 2004)
  This week's summary actually covers two weeks. Anyway, with OSCON,
  vacations and all that stuff, those are quiet weeks. Read on.

5.8.5 is out
  Perl 5.8.5 was released. The P5P announcement can be found at:

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040719222147.GG784%40plum.flirble.org

Readonlyness
  The thread that spawned from the RC2 release candidate and the problems
  solved by it then discussed the problem of the meaning of readonlyness
  of SVs. Does it mean that the internal representation of the SV (notably
  regarding UTF-8) should be read-only too? No precise consensus was
  reached, although Hugo suggested that a readonly PV can be upgraded to
  UTF-8, but not downgraded.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040720102342.GL784%40plum.flirble.org

Flexible exceptions
  Nicholas Clark wonders what represents the C compilation symbol
  PERL_FLEXIBLE_EXCEPTIONS. Nick Ing-Simmons says that it's an old,
  unmaintained branch of the code, no longer used. H. Merijn Brand speaks
  about chainsaws.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040713143217.GB1424%40plum.flirble.org

Snatching SVs
  Stas Bekman asks a question: how (from XS code) can he store an SV away
  and reuse it later, making sure that perl won't touch it and try to
  reuse it again. Dave Mitchell explains the difference between mortals
  and PADTMPs, and how Stas can achieve his goal.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=41016DE5.40206%40stason.org

Thread bugs
  Nigel Sandever remarks that sharing an array or a hash (in the ithread
  sense of the word) empties it. Elizabeth Mattijsen explains that it's a
  side-effect of using ties to share things, and Nick Ing-Simmons adds
  that it's expected behaviour (by design.) (bug #30702.)

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.11-30702-92297.10.3407352468845%40perl.org

  Nigel also reported (bug #30674) that perl segfaults when lots of
  threads are created. This is due to the lack of check for the return
  value of the internal CreateThread() function. He suggests that perl
  should die or panic in this case. Discussion goes on on memory
  allocators. Meanwhile, Nicholas patches.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.11-30674-92219.13.8761503317861%40perl.org

Other bugs
  Nicholas found that for 64 bit builds, there is a problem with
  overloading "0+". He then patched the bug out.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040714125211.GO784%40plum.flirble.org

  Mike Rosulek found that "passing @array[()] as the second arg to a ($;$)
  prototyped sub actually passes the first arg twice" (bug #30688). This
  was fixed by Rick Delaney.

  File::Find is known to be memory intensive when traversing deep
  directory trees (bug #30718). Jim Cromie's advice is to use
  File::Find::Rule instead.

  Ton Hospel reported that deleting a non-existent element of an array
  leaks memory. This was fixed by Dave Mitchell, who remarked that this
  bug doesn't affect hashes. (Bug #30733.)

  James Mastros makes perl dump core by localising $foo and then assigning
  to *foo (bug #30778).

  Autrijus Tang found (and patched) a bug in Test::Builder (bug #30783).
  It comes from the fact that it's not allowed to store an unshared
  reference in a shared structure. Thus, overloaded unshared refs are not
  allowed as test names.

  DH finds that "blib" uses Cwd and File::Spec, and consequently doesn't
  work to test Cwd and File::Spec. He proposes a patch, but Rafael has
  some concerns with it.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040722043138.40380.qmail%40web60801.mail.yahoo.com

To-do
  More to-do items were discussed and added to the perltodo list:

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040711194958.GI784%40plum.flirble.org

  Among wanted items: a reentrant regexp engine, autoloaded inlineable
  constants, better patchlevel information in the -v output, and more
  human beings to implement all that stuff.

Other news
  Casey West announced the resurrection of the grand Perl Power Tools
  project (and its associated mailing list).

      http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-07/msg00715.html

  Tels is in the process of releasing Math::BigInt v1.71, which addresses
  bug #30609 (reported last week.)

  Michael Schwern released Test::Simple 0.48_02 (alpha version), and
  announced that his aegis repository for Test::More is publicly
  accessible.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040719062510.GA19661%40windhund.schwern.org
      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040719165659.GA23035%40windhund.schwern.org

  Brad Elkins send some compilation fixes for AIX 5.1, to have PAR working
  correctly on it.

NetWare port
  P Aravinda sent a big patch to make perl compile on NetWare (or, more
  precisely, to cross-compile a perl for NetWare from Linux). Nicholas
  Clark raised some concerns concerning his patch, both on technical and
  on licensing points.

      http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-07/msg00570.html

About this summary
  This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly (or, sometimes,
  fortnightly) summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted
  on a mailing list, which subscription address is
  [email protected]. Comments and corrections welcome.