This Week on perl5-porters (9-15 June 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (9-15 June 2003)
  This was a quiet week -- summer approaches -- but a few interesting
  points were raised. New warnings, portability points, and miscellaneous
  bugs are covered in this summary.

A new printf warning
  Following-up to bug report #22599, Robin Barker added a new warning, in
  the 'printf' category : "Newline in left-justified string for printf".
  It's issued if a string to be left-justified by printf() or sprintf()
  (via the "%-ns" format) contains a newline.

$\ in a foreach() loop
  Ton Hospel reports (bug #22613) that if the loop variable used in a
  for() loop is $\ (the output record separator), then this new value
  doesn't in fact affect the behavior of print(). It should.

      http://xrl.us/jnt

"make" oddities
  Andy Dougherty reports some test failures for ExtUtils with maintperl on
  Solaris 8. They're caused by a difference between GNU make and Sun make,
  in handling commands split over several lines.

      http://xrl.us/jnu

fork() portability on BSD
  Alan Ferrency investigated bug #18849 : on some recent versions of
  FreeBSD (or other *BSD, including Mac OS X), if the SIGCHLD handler is
  set to 'IGNORE' and a child process is forked, then all subsequent
  system() calls made in the parent process will hang until the previously
  forked child has exited. The confusion comes from the SA_NOCLDWAIT flag,
  how it's defined, implemented and supported by different UNIX vendors.
  See the thread for the portability round-up (Tru64, Solaris, Linux, AIX,
  IRIX). This ended in a patch (#19765) specific to BSDish OSes.

      http://xrl.us/jnv

untie() partially working
  Aaron J Mackey finds that an untie() from within a FETCH or STORE is
  broken with perl 5.8.0. It worked in previous perls. He proposed a patch
  that reverts to the internals of untie() as they were in 5.6.x, but the
  root of the problem is not clear.

      Bug:   http://xrl.us/jnw
      Patch: http://xrl.us/jnx

In brief
  Rafael removed the $* special variable. See last week's summary for why.
  Using it still triggers a warning, though.

  Anthony Heading manages to get a panic error out of the regular
  expression compiler. The offending regexp is /(?:()?)?/.

  Steve Grazzini found out that a recent change in the formatting of the
  filetest entries in perlfunc broke perldoc.

  Dan Kogai tested perl on FreeBSD 5.1. He suggested to use perl's
  malloc() instead of the system's one, which is too slow in perl's
  context.

  Ilya Zakharevich proposed a lot of little OS/2 patches. This notably
  includes a test fix for MakeMaker. He also worked on perl's malloc().

About this summary
  This week's discussions were summarized by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly
  summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and/or via a mailing
  list, which subscription address is [email protected].
  Comments, corrections, additions, and suggestions are welcome.