This Week on perl5-porters (29 July / 4 August 2002)

This Week on perl5-porters (29 July / 4 August 2002)
     Now that perl 5.8.0 is out and flies by itself, the 5.9 development
     track begins. Learn about what may go (or not) in perl 5.9. Plus the
     usual amount of bugs.

   Some directions for perl 5.9
     Hugo van der Sanden posted his views on the general directions of perl
     5.9 development. Shortly, he listed (with varying degrees of importance
     or probability) : improving perl's speed ; cleaning the sources ;
     converging with Perl 6 (with a possible new perl6ish pragma, to use some
     of the incompatible Perl 6 constructs or deprecations) ; providing
     multiple Perl distributions containing a various amount of modules.

     There was also some handwaving (which I initiated) about having some
     kind of Perl 5 to Perl 6 or Parrot translator. This would probably
     involve improving the "B::" backend framework if this is the way to go.

         http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=200207301220.g6UCKtr07589%40crypt.compulink.co.uk

     (I now give the message links to google, so you can navigate the whole
     thread. I found this more convenient.)

     Pseudo-hashes and the old 5005 threads will be removed. Michael G
     Schwern provided a first patch to cut off pseudo-hashes, that doesn't
     handle the necessary changes to the core modules, esp. fields.pm and
     base.pm.

     Hugo also wondered if non-PerlIO perls should be deprecated. This
     decision should be based on some real-world feedback -- are there
     platforms that have problems with PerlIO ?

         http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200207301220.g6UCKvQ07607%40crypt.compulink.co.uk

   Change in the logic of the CPAN indexer
     As 5.8.0 is out, some problems arise when the CPAN shell is used to
     install modules that have a dual life (on CPAN and in the core.) Andreas
     Koenig has updated the CPAN indexer so that *it indexes perl
     distribution only for packages that have no separate lives on CPAN.* All
     packages that have dual lives have been also re-indexed ; this should
     solve current problems.

   PID and threads on Linux
     One of the specificities of the implementation of threads on Linux is
     that threads get different PIDs. So Elizabeth Mattijsen asked for a way
     to get this PID from inside Perl, because $$ is always the process
     number of thread 0.

     It turned out that "POSIX::getpid()" simply returns $$, and that $$ is
     is a read-only scalar, set at startup- and at fork-time. But the system
     call "getpid()" returns different values for different threads (on
     Linux).

     It was agreed that, to be portable (and POSIX-compliant), $$ should
     return the same value across all threads -- the current behavior is thus
     correct (but undocumented.) However Perl's built-in function "getppid()"
     always performs the underlying C call, and return different values from
     different threads. This should be fixed.

         http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=4.2.0.58.20020801191058.02b8a440%40mickey.dijkmat.nl

   A couple of core dumps
     Somebody reported that writing "%:: = """ with warnings enabled leads to
     immediate segfault (bug #15479). Elizabeth, trying to write something
     like "our ${""} : foo = 1", reported another core dump case (this should
     be a syntax error) (bug #15898). This lead to a small thread about the
     right place for regression tests for nonsense code like this. The
     conclusion is that they should go in the test file that seems the more
     appropriate for it (in those cases, respectively tests for symbol table
     hashes and for attributes.)

   Schwern's Thoughts from TPC
     Michael G Schwern sent a list of thoughts and ideas that were discussed
     at TPC :

     What new modules should be included in 5.10, and based on which criteria ?
     The simple criterion he proposes is : *Will this module help users
     install more modules?* He suggests notably to borgify CPANPLUS, a
     simplified LWP, Archive::Tar, Archive::Zip, Module::Build (this implies
     YAML), and Inline.

         http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020801160521.GB1064%40ool-18b93024.dyn.optonline.net

     About Inline, and related to the QA effort, Schwern suggests to test the
     core API and internals with Inline::C. Continuing on Inline, he emits
     also the idea that XS core modules may be ported to an Inline::C
     implementation. Brian Ingerson (author of Inline) acknowledges that
     Inline::C can be used at perl build-time, but he thinks that the only
     thing that needs to be installed on a user machine is *enough of
     Inline.pm to invoke Dynaloader. About 30 lines of code.* He adds that
     this is the only part of Inline that he would like to see distributed
     with 5.9.

         http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020801161356.GD1064%40ool-18b93024.dyn.optonline.net

     Finally, Schwern suggests to eliminate the changelogs and the old
     perldelta manpages from the perl distribution (those are pretty huge and
     can be distributed separately), and to provide an alternate bzip2
     tarball of perl.

   In brief
     Philip Hazel reported a couple of bugs about the "\C" regexp anchor.
     (Bugs #15763 and #15774).

     Ilya Zakharevich reported that list assignment with common variables on
     both sides (e.g. "($a,$b) = ($b,$a)") don't work with aliased variables
     (e.g. "($a,$b) = ($c,$d)" where $c is an alias to $b and $d an alias to
     $a.) Bug #15667.

     Craig Berry noticed that *extension building against an installed Perl
     on VMS is broken in 5.8.0*. He provided a patch, and said also that *in
     lieu of the patch, folks can either build extensions against an
     uninstalled Perl or simply copy the missing files manually.*

     Elizabeth Mattijsen reported a memory leak in threads::shared. Hopefully
     this problem will only need a patch to threads::shared, that can be
     released to CPAN. (Bug #15893.)

     Bleadperl now reports its version as 5.9.0, and Hugo began to apply
     patches. We're waiting for the first snapshot...

   About this summary
     This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, from Lyon, France.
     -- Nota. I'll be on vacation (and off-line) for two weeks in August :
     approximately from 12th to 25th. So there will be no summary for those
     weeks. If you find those summaries helpful, and if you want to become a
     superhero, take over the report for two little weeks! Please drop me a
     line at [email protected]. (If you find those summaries helpful
     but don't want to take them over, go send money to YAS. Perhaps they'll
     hire an interim writer.)