This Week on perl5-porters (Oct 04-10 2004)

This Week on perl5-porters (Oct 04-10 2004)

Crosscompiling perl
  Alexander Povolotsky, lacking a native compiler on Linux PPC, tried to
  crosscompile from Cygwin (Intel). Many people admonished that while
  crosscompiling perl is possible in principle, there's little support for
  it, so getting the native compiler in place would probably be easier.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00039.html

Threading crash with closures
  John Gardiner Myers reported (bug #31851) a bug in "threads" where
  $thread->join prematurely frees a closure because the CVs' op tree
  refcount isn't thread safe. [Please correct this explanation if
  necessary.]

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00065.html

Smoke failing on FreeBSD
  Abe Timmerman's new smoke machine, a FreeBSD-running sparc64, failed
  with what might be an integer-size configuration problem.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00071.html

Weird results from hash assignment with duplicate keys
  Boris Zentner, trying to remove duplicate hash values

    %h = reverse (%x = reverse %h);

  discovered a fascinating bug (#31865) in assigning duplicate keys to a
  hash, pinpointed by Rick Delaney (and Devel::Peeked by Graham Barr):

    $ perl5.8.3 -le 'print (%x = ("a",1,"b",2,"b",3));'
    bb
    $ perl5.6.1 -le 'print (%x = ("a",1,"b",2,"b",3));'
    a1bb3

  (should be 'a1b3').

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00073.html

Making regcomp a list op
  Dave Mitchell set the stage for fixing the behaviors of "(?{...})" and
  regex objects, by making "regcomp" receive the components of run-time
  regexes ($a, '-', $b in "/$a-$b/") as a list rather than a concatenation
  of the components. Commentators oohed and aahed as the chessmaster
  advanced his pawn. [If you're an internals novice like me, try
  understanding Dave's before and after "B::Concise" output, using
  "B::Concise" (what do the flags mean?), "perlguts" (the "Compiled code"
  section), and "perlcall" (what's a "PUSHMARK"?).]

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00132.html

IO::Poll undef fd unchecked in mask method
  Peter Dintelmann found a problem (bug #31864) in "IO::Poll", where its
  "mask" method incorrectly evaluated an "undef" argument as 0 (STDIN).

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00072.html

Dynaloader improvements and cleanup
  Vadim Konovalov continued his Dynaloader patching from the previous
  week, and while he was at it enabled statically linked extensions for
  Win32. More fixes to come.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00034.html
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00126.html

Releases
  Encode 2.03 - Dan Kogai

  Module::Build 0.26 - Ken Williams

Random quote
  From Dave Mitchell's sig:

  Any [programming] language that doesn't occasionally surprise the novice
  will pay for it by continually surprising the expert. -- Larry Wall

Reference
  The thread for bug number $BUGNUM can be found at
  http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=$BUGNUM

About this summary
  This summary was written by Scott Lanning. Summaries are published
  weekly at http://use.perl.org/ and posted to a mailing list whose
  subscription address is [email protected]. The archive is
  at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Comments and corrections
  welcome.