This Week on perl5-porters (28 July / 3 August 2002)

This Week on perl5-porters (28 July / 3 August 2002)
  This week will undoubtedly be known to the future generations as the
  two-release-candidate-week. Be the first to read about it. And don't
  miss the other interesting parts : this week's summary is full of
  action, suspense and bug fixes.

Release Candidates
  Jarkko released perl 5.8.1 RC3 and 5.8.1 RC4.

  RC3 announces the return of the hash randomisation : it's again turned
  on by default.

  In RC4 several modules were updated, notably MakeMaker and CPAN. The
  main problem with RC3 was that the CPAN module was forcing to use
  Module::Signature (to verify cryptographically signed modules), and this
  feature wasn't tested enough. Moreover Module::Signature is not part of
  the core. Autrijus Tang is working on better portability and integration
  for Module::Signature, so it may become part of the core some day.

  There was also some courteous fight about whether deprecating vstrings
  was a good thing or not in 5.8.1, regarding backward compatibility. It's
  apparently not finished yet (but Jarkko is until now keeping the
  deprecation warnings turned on.)

      http://xrl.us/n78

Notes from the P5P BOF, and perl 5.6.2
  Elizabeth Mattijsen posted the notes taken at the P5P meeting in Paris,
  after YAPC::EU. Go read it, that's an interesting complement to this
  summary.

      http://xrl.us/n79

  One of the points discussed was the importance of a 5.6.2 release -- the
  conclusion being that "it's more important to release 5.6.2 than Sarathy
  to be able to fix all his bugs". Therefore, Sarathy transferred the 5.6
  pumpkin to Rafael, who in turn posted plans for 5.6.2 (and perhaps
  5.6.3). A new branch was created in the perforce repository ; it's
  available like bleadperl and maintperl via rsync (pathnames being
  /perl-5.6.2 and /perl-5.6.2-diffs for the patches) and via the APC. The
  goal of this new release is mainly to fix the known problems to compile
  it on recent systems ; for example, Configure seems to produce no
  makefile on Mac OS X with a case-insensitive filesystem.

      http://xrl.us/n8a

To packagers
  The DESTDIR variable is now honored by "make install", to specify a
  prefix to all installation paths. This should please RPM package
  maintainers, thanks to Michael Schroeder. See the INSTALL file for
  details.

STDOUT reopened
  Chris Nandor complains that opening a file for reading when STDOUT has
  been just closed emits a warning : "Filehandle STDOUT opened only for
  input". That's because the newly opened filehandle gets the file
  descriptor number of STDOUT (which is 1). As the file descriptors are
  actually allocated by the C-level system call API, and as STDOUT is
  always the fd 1 by definition, there is no way to change this ; however,
  the condition on which the warning is produced could be changed, if we
  could agree on it.

      http://xrl.us/n8b

Still working on MakeMaker
  Steve Hay and Michael Schwern were trying to solve a MakeMaker
  regression that prevented libapreq to build correctly on Windows XP with
  VC++ 6.0. Apparently the problem comes from a hackish workaround for a
  now-solved MakeMaker bug in the libapreq sources (MakeMaker wasn't
  handling recursive makes correctly.) Michael fixed other bugs as well.
  As of this writing, the latest release of MakeMaker on CPAN is
  6.13^W14^W^W^W 6.15.

In Brief
  Dave Mitchell found and fixed a utf8+regex regression bug in 5.8.1-RC2.
  Abigail found another regex regression bug (#23171), that was fixed by
  Hugo.

  When "use File::Glob ':glob'" is enabled, calling twice the glob
  angle-bracket operator may cause a segfault or a memory corruption error
  (bug #23185). Marcus Holland-Moritz found out that two incompatible
  internals APIs were mistakenly used together, and provided a fix.

  Michael Schwern notices that "perldoc CPAN" gives the doc for the cpan
  script on Mac OS X, due to the case-insensitive filesystem. To get the
  docs for the module, it's necessary to tell explicitly "perldoc
  CPAN.pm".

  Ed Avis finds that localization of $_ fails when it's aliased to $1. Bug
  #23141.

  Stephen McCamant continues to improve B::Deparse.

  Enache Adrian proposed tests for B::Bytecode and B::ByteLoader. They
  weren't integrated into maintperl, though, due to potential
  instabilities.

  Enache also fixed bug #23207, about chained calls to ^= not behaving
  properly.

  Abe Timmerman released Test::Smoke 1.18.

  Look, a spec for the META.yml file ! (it may be a bit outdated though.)

      http://module-build.sourceforge.net/META-spec.html

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