This Fortnight on perl5-porters - (13-26 November 2006)

This Fortnight on perl5-porters - 13-26 November 2006

   [we could] not increment the reference count (and hope the SV is still
   around when the lvalue subroutine is called) -- Gerard Goossen

   Hope and programming don't mix well usually. -- Rafaël Garcia-Suarez

Topics of Interest

Installing Perl still shouldn't feel like a rite of passage

   The thread continued unabated this last fortnight, with a lot of
   discussion on how to improve INSTALL. The document attempts to address
   a number of conflicting requirements, which means that it won't be
   easy to get right.

     http://xrl.us/tkb6

Failures while attempting to install Plagger with "blead"

   Steve Peters continued to analyse the reasons why Plagger failed to
   build on "blead". It turns out that some prerequisites also fail on
   5.8.8, so it's not as if it's completely "blead"'s fault.

     Stress testing stress
     http://xrl.us/tkb7

Change 24714 broke "Term::ReadLine::Gnu" TODO

   Andreas König found that "Term::ReadLine::Gnu" was whacked on "blead",
   which was due to what Nicholas Clark categorised as an over-ambitious
   patch to copy SVs lazily in "sv_setsv()".

     http://xrl.us/tar8

The _ prototype does not work correctly on sub x (_) x;

   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason was the first person to notice a problem with
   the new _ (underscore) prototype (that indicates that the routine
   operates on $_ by default).

   If one defines a routine, such as:

     sub odd (_) {
           return $_ % 2
     }

   ... then calling "odd" (as opposed to "odd()") bypasses the
   pass-the-$_ mechanism. Rafaël Garcia-Suarez fixed this up straight
   away.

     still in beta
     http://xrl.us/tkb8

Memory leak with "s///" and hashes

   Rafaël was puzzled by a leak with substitutions and hashes and
   wondered if the problem was something to do with shared keys. Dave
   Mitchell realised that the problem was something else entirely, and
   reduced Rafaël's original problematic code down to a one-liner.

   Dave's code showed that the problem was that as soon as one executed a
   regular expression with an alternation (that is, "/a|b/"), a few SVs
   were leaked each time. Yves Orton sighed, and admitted that it was
   probably all his fault.

   Dave pinpointed exactly where in the code they were leaking from. This
   was enough to help Yves, and he supplied a fix in short order. Which
   worked, and was thus applied.

     And they lived happily unallocated ever after
     http://xrl.us/tkb9

How do I check a valid mail address?

   Aaron Sherman took a look at the stock answer to this question (in
   perlfaq8) and dusted it down and made a few improvements. The change
   was promptly accepted by Rafaël.

   For some strange reason, the thread then devolved into a long
   discussion about locales, Unicode and escaping characters that don't
   need to be escaped.

     http://xrl.us/tkca

Testing bleadperl with "Pod::Coverage"

   Steve Peters noticed that "Pod::Coverage" thought that lots of
   routines weren't documented in "blead". The routines in question were
   all constant routines, and, thanks to Nicholas Clark's efforts to
   reduce the amount of memory they use, they are now so small that they
   escape "Pod::Coverage"'s attention entirely. Nicholas suggested one
   way of fixing this.

'threads' failures

   Jerry D. Hedden cooked up a torture test to provoke race conditions
   more easily with threads. The results exceeded his wildest dreams (or
   nightmares, take your pick).

   Dave Mitchell gave Jerry some assistance, and after a while Jerry
   found the root of the problem that was responsible for nearly all the
   errors. Once this was fixed, only a couple remained, but Jerry had a
   feeling he knew why they were occurring.

     http://xrl.us/tkcb

"PL_perlio_fd_refcnt" and "PERL_TRACK_MEMPOOL"

   Jan Dubois reported that things were still not playing nicely in
   PerlIO land when the right combination of configuration parameters was
   found. The problem was that the underlying memory allocation routine
   was receiving a pointer to a block of memory allocated by a
   higher-level allocation wrapper.

   The higher level code is needed when threads come into play, where
   more detailed knowledge about which thread asked for the allocated
   memory becomes more important (especially on Win32). Jarkko Hietaniemi
   had an idea of how it could be fixed.

     http://xrl.us/tkcc

   Jerry hacked around a bit more, and found that a detached thread was
   destructing itself after the main script had already ended, but didn't
   know how to pin it down in more detail. After stepping through the
   code he found a wonderful comment "/* FIXME: treaddead ??? */" in the
   routine at the top of the call stack.

   Evidently he was onto something, and supplied a patch to fix it up,
   which Rafaël dutifully applied.

     http://xrl.us/tkcd

   Having pondered the metaphysical issues of FIXME comments in code for
   a while, Jerry grepped the source to see if there were any others
   lying in ambush... and discovered dozens.

   He wondered whether it was worth going through the list and adding
   items to the TODO list as needed. Warnocked.

     http://xrl.us/tkce

Fix linker error on Win32

   Recent code changes to "blead" caused linker failures on Win32. Both
   he and Yves Orton independently discovered the fix. So Rafaël applied
   the change, but Steve continued to note a crash in
   ext/XS/APItest/t/svsetsv.t.

   Steve finally managed to get things straightened out with some
   particularly devious macro trickery.

     pay no attention to the man behind the preprocessor
     http://xrl.us/tkcf

"bignum" breaks "Getopt::Long"

   It's not so much that one breaks the other, it's just that politely
   ignoring each other can only get you so far. H.Merijn Brand uncovered
   a number of problems when he needed 64 bit integers on a 32-bit CPU,
   so he just added "-Mbignum" to the command-line, and was faintly
   surprised when things fell apart.

   There followed a long thread about implicit assumptions, containers
   and content, the uselessness of "ref($foo) eq 'REF'". In the middle,
   Yves Orton proposed a patch to fix things up, and a nice overview of
   why it's so difficult to write code that asks "can I use this
   reference as an array?".

     http://xrl.us/tkcg

   Tels discovered that "Benchmark" fails under "-Mbignum" and filed bug
   #40917. Sadahiro Tomoyuki determined what the problem was and came up
   with a fix, which Steve Peters applied.

     http://xrl.us/tkch

lvalue "substr" using mortals

   Gerard Goossen returned to a problem he raised in August:

     http://xrl.us/tkci

   with a patch that he proposed to fix the behaviour. Rafaël had quick
   look at Gerard's idea, but wondered if it wasn't just sweeping the
   underlying problem under the carpet until the end of the scope. Gerard
   explained that he saw there were two alternatives available and how to
   make them work.

   Unfortunately, after a little thought, he realised that the first
   alternative couldn't work. Rafaël found another couple of problems
   with it as well, and hinted that the second alternative was possibly
   too fragile. It remains to be seen whether some sort of weak reference
   might do the trick.

     http://xrl.us/tkcj

Config on 'other OS's

   H.Merijn Brand did some house-keeping on Configure. First he refreshed
   the MC units.

     http://xrl.us/tkck

   and then went through to see which new variables that had been added
   to Configure in recent times had no sensible defaults for them. The
   platforms included Plan 9, Win32, VMS, Symbian and a few others.

   He also wrote some code to ensure that changes in the future will come
   up on the radar much more quickly, rather than having to remember to
   do run some quickly-forgotten script, A number of porters pitched in
   and filled out most of the missing blanks.

     http://xrl.us/tkcm

"Class::MethodMaker" breaks somewhere between 5.9.3 and 5.9.4

   Steffen Schwigon noticed that this module, a pre-requisite for several
   dozen modules on CPAN alone, fails on "blead", from 5.9.4 onwards.
   Rafaël traced this to a change that outlawed the lvalue use of
   "GvNAME".

   Steve Peters fixed things up, and started to work on getting ppport up
   to speed on the matter.

     http://xrl.us/tkcn

Can gcc's "ar" command use a file to list the objects to add?

   Steve Hay was trying to teach "ar" to look at a file and use its
   contents as a list of object names to add to a library, all for the
   sake of reducing the length of a command line.

   Nicholas Clark wondered if "miniperl" was usable at this point, in
   which case it could be used to furnish basic "xargs" functionality.

     http://xrl.us/tkco

perl5db.pl detecting forked debugger on VMS

   John E. Malmberg was back in town, hacking perl on VMS. He was having
   trouble with the debugger, and he and Craig A. Berry thrashed out the
   issues.

     http://xrl.us/tkcp

   Later on he committed a patch, which provided some nifty functionality
   for running the debugger in a separate terminal windows. Craig A.
   Berry thought the patch was promising, although he had a couple of
   reservations about the implementation. Nevertheless, he applied the
   patch and promised to take the debugger out for a spin.

     http://xrl.us/tkcq

28325/6 breaks "DateTime::Format::Strptime"

   Andreas Knig isolated the change that caused
   "DateTime::Format::Strptime" to start falling over. Yves Orton
   realised that this was a symptom of a bug in the regular expression
   engine, made the appropriate fix, and added a test to make sure it
   stays fixed.

     http://xrl.us/tkcr

   The patch caused something else to fall over in the test suite. This
   turned out to be because Yves forgot to include all the relevant
   pieces needed.

     http://xrl.us/tkcs

   Andeas also caught the problem, leading Nicholas to comment that
   t/harness needs to become fussier, since it misses things on Win32
   (where Yves develops) that only show up under "TEST" on Unix.

     http://xrl.us/tkct

Configure silence for 5005threads

   Even though 5.005 threads have been completely excised from the 5.10
   codebase, the Configure infrastructure still knows about it, since it
   is used to generate the final "Configure" scripts for both "maint" and
   "blead". He did manage, however, to make it shut up.

     http://xrl.us/tkcu

New development release in sight

   Rafaël announced that he wanted to push 5.9.5 out the door, and asked
   the porters what they were working on, and what they thought would be
   ready soon.

   Dave Mitchell admitted that he had broken a few things recently but
   was unlikely to find the time in the next few weeks to attempt the
   repairs.

   Steve Peters wanted to make directory handles more useful, but was
   stuck on a problem with pipes hanging on OpenBSD, and was having
   trouble ruling Perl out before filing a bug with the OpenBSD kernel
   hackers.

   H.Merijn Brand mentioned that there were a few "Configure" issues he
   wanted to look into, and possibly an edit or two to the README/INSTALL
   issues as raised by Michael G. Schwern. H.Merijn's "Configure" issues
   reminded Andy Dougherty about a problem with locales, GNU's make and
   Solaris, but lacked a Solaris box to check it out.

   Yves Orton mapped out his priorities, mainly bug fixes and making
   semi-broken things work sanely. One big item was that he wanted to get
   the regular expression engine to a state where custom engines could be
   dropped in, that would allow, for instance, test coverage analysis of
   regular expressions, or otherwise hacking on the engine without being
   forced to relink perl.

   Steve Hay wants to get Visual C++ support finished, and resolve the
   bug that prevents mod_perl 1.x from building successfully. When
   Nicholas Clark mentioned the probable cause of the problem, it
   reminded Rick Delaney about diddling %INC to force a module to be
   reloaded (something that "mod_perl" likes doing a lot). And that was
   enough for Nicholas to track down the offending code, and fix it.

   Jos I. Boumans provided the list of what modules need to go into core
   in order for CPANPLUS to be added in.

   Philip M. Gollucci noted that there were still some 5.005 threads
   remnants dotted about in the code. Steve Hay thought that it was just
   harmless detritus, since the 5.005 threads implementation code had
   been removed over four years ago. Steve Hay thought that it should be
   cleaned up completely, if only to avoid further confusion in the
   future.

   Andy Dougherty cautioned that further cleaning would only add to the
   difficulty of merging "blead" back into "maint". H.Merijn agreed,
   saying that the current state of affairs was pretty much optimal.

     http://xrl.us/tkcv

io_sock.t failure with VC8

   Steve Hay discovered that this test reads its own source code, and saw
   that it managed to read only 4096 bytes of code and thus flunked the
   test. Steve thought the number was a little too coincidental to have
   been left to chance, and wondered where to start looking.

     my lucky number
     http://xrl.us/tkcw

   Steve Hay fixed up problems in posix.t with "strftime" hanging when
   VC8 was used to build Perl. He traced it down to the fact that the C
   run-time library didn't recognise %D as a valid format, and things
   went downhill from there.

     http://xrl.us/tkcx

   He also tidied up the warnings about deprecated CRT function names in
   VC8, and updated "perltodo", because what he did was at best a
   stop-gap measure, and someone needs to come up with something better.

     http://xrl.us/tkcy

"qr//" benchmark

   Tels ran some benchmarks on compiled regexps and wondered what the
   numbers meant. A long discussion followed, developing on the concepts
   of implementing a "rule" feature for Perl 5, how compiled regexps
   behave, how to deal with combining precompiled regexps and best
   practices for building a big precompiled expression from a number of
   smaller fragments.

     http://xrl.us/tkcz

Patches of Interest

static linkage for perl.exe for win32

   A number of porters agreed that this would be useful, and in the end
   the necessary changes were committed to Win32's Makefile.

     http://xrl.us/tkc2

Regex Utility Functions and Substitution Fix (XML::Twig core dump)

   Yves recent work to teach the regular expression optimiser about
   lookahead assertions threw some other assumptions about target lengths
   off. So he whipped up a patch to straighten things out. Bundled in
   with the patch were assorted improvements he'd made to the engine here
   and there.

     http://xrl.us/tkc3

Assorted goodness added to the regular expression engine

   Now that the regular expression has a new recursion syntax (via
   "(?1)"), Yves has been exercising them by converting old-style
   "(??{...}" recursion patterns over to it, and in doing so discovered a
   fundamental limitation, in that some times you want to recurse back to
   a capture buffer that's relative to the current location, not the
   beginning. So he extended "(?1)" to allow "(?-1)", and made it work,
   too.

     A new feature in every box
     http://xrl.us/tkc4

   He also closed out bug #19049 and added relative backreferences, which
   means you can say "/foo (\w+) bar (\w+) \R1/" and the reference count
   runs backwards from the current point, leftwards, to the nth capture
   group.

     I for one will find this handy
     http://xrl.us/tkc5

   He also fixed up "/a++b/" by teaching the optimiser to look for "ab"
   before bringing the heavy artillery to bear.

     http://xrl.us/tkc6

   He also added "regmust()" to re.pm/re.xs, which exposes to the client
   code what the optimiser considers to be the floating and anchored
   strings of a potential match.

     http://xrl.us/tkc7

   In other news, Ybes also reorganised the flags of the "regexp" struct
   into two fields, one internal, and one external and applied a
   consistent naming convention.

     Separation of interest
     http://xrl.us/tkc8

New and old bugs from RT

search position reset after "local" save/restore (#1716)

   Yves Orton went travelling back in time to have a look at some really
   olde bugs. This earliest bug was an issue of magic. Yves thought that
   there should be some way of getting things to work correctly for "pos"
   at least.

   This reminded Dave Mitchell that he had been meaning to get around to
   looking at how "local" and magic play together (or not), and told Yves
   that it was probably on his personal TODO list. Ironically, the sig
   attached to the reply was "Never do today what you can put off till
   tomorrow."

     Magic, murder and the weather
     http://xrl.us/tkc9

Undefining signals (#2383)

   Rafaël also retired another ancient bug: assigning "undef" to a signal
   handler now restores the default handler.

     http://xrl.us/tkda

segfault on big regexp (#3689)

   Yves found another bug report concerning core dumping badness over a
   regular expression that Steve Peters missed a while back when he
   closed out several zillion bugs,and noted that it was fixed in
   "blead".

     http://xrl.us/tkdb

misplaced HERE mark in regexp error (#4360)

   Yves explained that attempts to use variable width look-behind
   assertions (which aren't currently implemented in Perl, although Yves
   will no doubt implement them next week) cause the HERE mark to point
   at the wrong place.

   This is because by the time the parser has figured out that there is
   indeed a variable width look-behind assertion, it no lacks the neurons
   to remember *where* it actually occurred. Yves suggested that the best
   way forward would be to drop the HERE marker in this context.

     He should know
     http://xrl.us/tkdc

Regexp replaces using large replacement variables fails (#6006)

   Yves classified this bug a more of a parsing issue than a regular
   expression issue (the fact that "${10}" doesn't behave as it should
   (like $10)). He added a TODO test for someone else to address.

     http://xrl.us/tkdd

"\G" with "/h" results in infinite loop in 5.6 and later (#6893)

   Yves thought that this bug stank, since it involved people playing
   around with things that the regular expression engine would rather
   keep to itself. He fixed the problem, but this caused a test in
   "Text::Balanced" to fail. But then again, as the man page of that
   module says, "There are undoubtedly serious bugs lurking somewhere in
   this code".

     http://xrl.us/tkde

   With another round of patching, he managed to get thing into good
   shape.

     http://xrl.us/tkdf

bug in "s/\s$word\s/ /gi" and $& (#18209)

   Yves could not reproduce this problem, either in "maint" or "blead".
   Just to be on the safe side, he wrote a test case to make sure someone
   finds out about it if it ever comes back again.

     http://xrl.us/tkdg

"(a|b)*" cannot match a string longer than "2**15-1" characters (#18268)

   Yves confirmed that this was indeed a hard limit of the regular
   expression engine and couldn't see how it could be fixed, so he added
   a couple of tests to the test suite, and marked them TODO.

     http://xrl.us/tkdh

"/(.*)[bc]/" 10000 times slower in 5.8.0 vs 5.6.1 (#22395)

   This was caused by an over-pessimisation in change #14115. Yves
   optimised the common case to make it go 10000 time faster again.

     http://xrl.us/tkdi

   He also made another regular expression go speedy fast again (bug in
   regexp "m/(.*?)b/ig") (#25822)

     http://xrl.us/tkdj

"Encode::is_utf8" on tainted UTF8 string returns false (#32687)

   Rafaël fixed up the tainting logic of "blead"'s copy of "Encode" and
   suggested to Dan Kogai that he incorporate the change in his own
   version.

     Paging Dan "Mr. Encode Maintainer" Kogai, white courtesy phone
     http://xrl.us/tkdk

$^R undefined on matches involving backreferences (#36909)

   Yves also fixed this bug. H.Merijn yearned to clean up the white space
   as well, thought about what Dave Mitchell might say, and decided to do
   nothing.

     http://xrl.us/tkdm

   The above change also fixed a bug your humble summariser uncovered a
   couple of years ago. Now it's fixed. Yay Yves! ($^R value lost in
   (?:...)? constructs, bug #32840)

     http://xrl.us/tkdn

Regexp stack overflow in 5.8.7 (#37230)

   Brian Candler posted a bug report in September concerning a regular
   expression used to parse a particularly devious line in an Apache log
   file. Yves was pretty sure that the problem was resolved in "blead".

     http://xrl.us/tkdo

"Cwd::chdir()" and handles (#38466)

   Ken Williams was astonished to learn that "chdir" may operate on file
   handles. He updated the "PathTools" distribution.

     "Holy crap, chdir() can accept a filehandle? I had no idea."
     http://xrl.us/tasi

segfault in regex on a very long string (#40654)

   Stas Bekman checked in to see what the status is with this bug.
   Answer: fixed in "blead", still fails in latest "maint".

     http://xrl.us/tkdp

perlop "=>" (#40854)

   Dr. Ruud asked a fairly innocent question about bareword hash keys and
   the fat comma operator, and this generated a certain amount of
   traffic. John Peacock correctly identified the issue as being the fact
   that the leading zero of the bareword was triggering octal
   interpretation.

     http://xrl.us/tkdq

"find2perl -ls" very slow on some LDAP-based "getpwent" systems (#40867)

   David Dyck found that "find2perl"'s propensity to warm its caches
   caused massive slowdowns on big LDAP directories, and wondered if
   there would be any problems in adopting a lazy caching strategy.
   Rafaël saw no problem.

     do not do today...
     http://xrl.us/tkdr

"pod2xxx" requires "Pod::*" parsers to reset state (#40899)

   espie uncovered a problem with Pod::Man *et al.* using a single POD
   parser object to parse multiple files, which causes problems. Earlier
   files with POD errors influence the rendering of subsequent files.
   (This issue reared its head a few months back, when Russ Alberry was
   working on the podlators distribution).

     http://xrl.us/tkds

Record reads and :encoding don't mix (#40901)

   Christopher J. Madsen discovered that reading fixed-length records
   (for instance, with "$/ = \10") and ":encoding" don't play well
   together. Especially when converting between EBCDIC and UTF-8.

     why am I not surprised?
     http://xrl.us/tkdt

'Aho-Corasick' regex patch (28373) not thread-safe (#40954)

   Jerry D. Hedden found, much to Yves's dismay, that the Aho-Corasick
   patch was not thread-safe. When Yves looked at what needed to be done
   he threw up his hands in horror and wondered if there wasn't a better
   way of abstracted the differences between threaded an unthreaded
   builds.

   The main problem is that the op-tree (which also contains regops) is
   shared among all threads, so detached threads tend to have more
   problems with heavy objects hanging off the op-tree. Dave Mitchell
   said that he had plans for a "copy-on-retrieve" technique for this
   problem, which would mean that a lot of these sorts of issues with
   threads would suddenly disappear.

     http://xrl.us/tkdu

   Similarly, Jerry also found that "Perl_op_clear" is not thread-safe
   (#40965).

     http://xrl.us/tkdv

"Date::Parse" mysteriously lowercasing text when an unrelated variable 
is used. (#40957)

   Mumia W. encountered a curious bug involving sorts, closures and "lc"
   which resulted in some very strange action at a distance.

     and there was great puzzlement
     http://xrl.us/tkdw

Build fails with "-DNO_MATHOMS" (#40963)

   Jerry D. Hedden found that you can't build perl without mathoms,
   despite what it says on the tin.

     http://xrl.us/tkdx

MSWin32: can't disable crlf trans. on STDxxx using :raw or binmode (#40964)

   Vaclav Ovsik built a perl with his bare hands on Win32, and noticed
   that he couldn't disable line-endings translations through the PerlIO
   layer.

     http://xrl.us/tkdy

SIGSEGV with "pos()" in regexp (#40989)

   Christian Mittag had the decency to produce one of the tiniest
   programs possible to provoke a core dump, with the following code:

     $_="a\x{111}\x{111}a\t";
     s/\t/pos;' ';/eg;

   Unfortunately no-one leapt to his rescue.

     won't you come on down to my
     http://xrl.us/tkdz

Perl5 Bug Summary

   For the first time in a quite some time, a significant reduction in
   the number of open bugs was observed. Yay! Congratulations to everyone
   who helped out.

     5 open, 7 closed
     http://xrl.us/tkd2

     7 open.... and *18* closed
     http://xrl.us/tkd3

     We need a "choose random bug" link
     http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html

New Core Modules

   *   "threads" went to version 1.51 and on to version 1.52.

         http://xrl.us/tkd4
         http://xrl.us/tkd5

   *   "Module::Pluggable" was offered to the core.

         Jos, unplugged
         http://xrl.us/tkd6

   *   "Module::Load::Conditional" made it to the core. Tels wondered
       about core bloat, but I told him that there was nothing to worry
       about.

         It's all good
         http://xrl.us/tkd7

   *   "IPC::Cmd" also went past Go and collected $200.

         http://xrl.us/tkd8

In Brief

   The "WHOA THERE" messages were toned down.

     http://xrl.us/tkd9

   Yves Orton was a busy man this week, in case you hadn't already
   realised. Some more of his handiwork included noticing that bug #6719
   wasn't. It was

     working as documented
     http://xrl.us/tkea

   Bug #17542 is no longer confuses on "blead",

     http://xrl.us/tkeb

   $` is now always correct after replacement (bug #19049)

     http://xrl.us/tkec

   and there are no more spurious undefs in "@-" and "@+" during "(?{})"
   and "(??{})" (bug #22614)

     http://xrl.us/tked

   In other news, Rafaël fixed up a problem with base.pm calling
   "->isa()" (bug #24824)

     http://xrl.us/tkee

   and made tied variables work with .= <> in blead (bug #38631)

     http://xrl.us/tkef

   On the other hand, he didn't know what to do when $1 is bound to an
   out-of-scope variable so he added an assert in the code, to fail
   gracefully, (bug #38869)

     http://xrl.us/tkeg

   although he managed to make "Tie::Memoize::EXISTS" cache its value
   (bug #39026),

     http://xrl.us/tkeh

   as well as ensuring that "rcatline" stringifies references (bug
   #39037) (when it has to).

     http://xrl.us/tkei

   Adriano Ferreira closed out a "Symbol::delete_package()" bug (bug
   #34078) (a documentation patch), since the documentation has already
   been patched,

     http://xrl.us/tkej

   and added some tests and documentation for "&=", "|=" and "^=" (bug
   #36689)

     http://xrl.us/tkek

   as well as an improvement to a documentation example for
   "File::Basename". (bug #40866)

     http://xrl.us/tkem

   Nicholas Clark managed to resolve the "blead" crash in
   "Perl_pp_entersub()" (bug #40681) to his satisfaction by tweaking the
   "sv_setsv_flags" macro's behaviour.

     http://xrl.us/tken

   Philippe found some inconsistencies in items formatted with "pod2html"
   (bug #40851), but no "pod2html" specialists were on hand to offer
   advice.

     http://xrl.us/tkeo

   Philip M. Gollucci thought that "rt.perl.org" needs a 5.9.5 category
   for reporting bugs.

     http://xrl.us/tkep

   Mike Guy, man of infinite memory, recalled that list assignments with
   lvalue "undef"s (such as "($foo, undef, $bar) = @list") was introduced
   between 5.004_04 and 5.004_05.

     http://xrl.us/tkeq

   Buu wondered if you could create lexicals via other methods than "my".

     why?
     http://xrl.us/tker

   Ken Williams wanted a regression test for the change to
   "ExtUtils::ParseXS" for $filepathname.

     Warnocked
     http://xrl.us/tkes

   Ron Blaschke had some thoughts on Microsoft Visual C++ 8.0 (quite an
   essay, really), and Steve Hay commented that he had reached much the
   same conclusion.

     http://xrl.us/tket

   H.Merijn Brand and HP-UX 11.xx and GNU gcc can make the 5.8.x debugger
   dump core at will.

     http://xrl.us/tkeu

   Phil Pennock penned a message describing problems in
   "IO::Socket::INET6" and "INET4" compatibility.

     http://xrl.us/tkev

   Andreas König noted that patch 28788 to bleadperl breaks "XML::Atom",
   so Steve Peters fixed things up.

     http://xrl.us/tkew

   "POSIX::remove()" deletes directories now, because the specification
   says it should.

     http://xrl.us/tkex

   "Text::Template" fails with bleadperl and so it should, because it
   uses "\Q" to quotemeta a string, and that string contains "'\", and
   quotemeta is now correctly doubling up the backslash.

     http://xrl.us/tkey

   Jarkko gave us a pointer to the Safer C Library.

     they've done it now
     http://xrl.us/tkez

   Nicholas wondered if it was worth warning about unused lexicals.

     http://xrl.us/tke2

   He also met up with an old familiar silly error, and as a result
   "Carp"'s cache should work better.

     hand the man a brownie point
     http://xrl.us/tke3

   Jarkko bestowed some portability updates upon perlhack,

     http://xrl.us/tke4

   and pointed the fire extinguisher at certain bits of code that the
   daily smokes were coughing over.

     http://xrl.us/tke5

About this summary

   This summary was written by David Landgren. My apologies to those of
   you undergoing summary withdrawal symptoms. The reason there was no
   summary last week was that I spent all my tuits working on slides for
   the French Perl Workshop. If perl 5.10 isn't released before
   YAPC::Europe next year, I just might have to inflict my talk on
   another audience...

   In the previous summary, I wrote that Brandon Black wrote "Class::C3",
   when in fact it was written by Stevan Little. Brandon is the current
   maintainer. My apologies to both for the mix-up.

   Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a
   mailing list, (subscription: [email protected]). The
   archive is at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Corrections
   and comments are welcome.

   If you found this summary useful, please consider contributing to the
   Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.

-- 
"It's overkill of course, but you can never have too much overkill."