This Week on perl5-porters (4-10 August 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (4-10 August 2003)
  The bulk of the discussion, this week, was about platform-specific
  adjustments for the upcoming 5.8.1, and other testing feedback. However,
  don't miss the other interesting topics : v-strings (again), autoboxing,
  and the usual load of features and bugfixes.

v-strings
  In short : v-strings are back in 5.8.1.

  Long version : Jarkko Hietaniemi asked Larry for the ultimate advice. In
  the long term, the v1.2.3 form of v-strings will go away, as well as
  the confusing equality between 1.2.3 and the "\1\2\3" string. In Perl 6,
  1.2.3 is going (most probably) to be a full-fledged version object.
  Consequently, the 1.2.3 notation should not be deprecated. A new
  notation, qv[5.6], might be introduced for version objects with only
  one decimal point.

      http://xrl.us/oze

  So Jarkko did put everything about v-strings like it was in perl 5.8.0
  (except the fix for barewords of the form "v65", autoquoted by "=>", see
  previous weeks.) v-strings don't produce deprecation warnings anymore,
  because issuing them only at the right places would be too complicated.
  John Peacock is going to produce some design document in order to get
  version objects in Perl 5.10 as close as possible to the future Perl 6
  version objects.

  At some point, Michael G Schwern advocated faster release cycles,
  leading to faster deprecation cycles. Alan Burlison commented with
  insight.

      http://xrl.us/ozf

autobox
  chocolateboy proposed a patch to add a new lexically-scoped pragma,
  "autobox" (the name of this feature comes from Java and C#). This patch,
  against perl 5.8.1 RC4, is also available from CPAN. Basically it allows
  methods to be invoked on unblessed references and on scalars. It
  provoked a wide range of different reactions.

  Chip Salzenberg hates the feature. Other disapprovals follow : Abigail,
  Graham Barr, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, mostly because they find the new
  syntax inconsistent with the rest of Perl 5, like pseudohashes were.
  Tassilo von Parseval, Michael Schwern and James Duncan like it. Alan
  Burlison wonders about performance impact. Claes Jacobsson wonders if
  the name "autobox" is well chosen. Simon Cozens comments negatively on
  the implementation and posts the source of his Ruby.pm module, that
  I've probably seen on the fwp mailing list before.

  Hugo van der Sanden has the wise word : the core must be adjusted so
  that it's possible to write pragmas like autobox without requiring a
  core patch.

      http://xrl.us/ozg
      http://search.cpan.org/author/CHOCOLATE/autobox-0.03/lib/autobox.pm

Cygwin
  Gerrit P. Haase, Merijn Brand and Jarkko were busy solving problems with
  compiling perl on recent releases of Cygwin (1.3.22, 1.5), mainly due to
  evil typecasts between unsigned and signed integers. At some point this
  ended up in a patch to the stdint.h header file that comes with cygwin
  1.5.

  Meanwhile, Jari Aalto found that Sys::Syslog doesn't log anything,
  apparently, under Cygwin (Cygwin does not use the /var/log/syslog
  logfile, but it should direct the calls to the Windows event log.)

MakeMaker and PASTHRU
  Steve Hay reminds about a MakeMaker bug he found : it's not passing
  DEFINE and INC arguments to other Makefile.PL's in subdirectories, at
  least on Windows. After having tried a few tweaks, Michael Schwern
  reaches the conclusion that trying to solve such complex issues just
  before an imminent release is not a wise idea.

      http://xrl.us/ozh

perlreref
  Iain Truskett added a new manpage into the documentation : perlreref, a
  handy regular expression quick reference. It will be available in perl
  5.8.1.

      http://xrl.us/ozi

In Brief
  Fergal Daly finds that passing a hash slice in the argument list of a
  function autovivifies non-existent keys. However hash slices alone don't
  make autovivification happen, nor does hash elements. This behaviour
  exists since at least 5.005_03, but looks like a bug nevertheless.

      http://xrl.us/ozj

  Johan Vromans asked for a way to know what files ExtUtils::Makemaker is
  going to install (via "make install"), without actually installing them.
  There's currently no easy way to have this information, but Michael
  Schwern is going to add a packlist target to the Makefile that will be
  runnable separately from the complete install.

      http://xrl.us/ozk

  Raphael Manfredi announced that he wants to revitalize the metaconfig
  project. The "dist" distribution on CPAN hasn't been updated since 1997.

      http://xrl.us/ozl

  Dave Mitchell fixed something hidden deeply inside the internals of the
  lexical scopes. As a result, SelfStubber began to emit a new warning,
  "Variable "$nested" is not available", $nested being a lexical variable
  used in a recursive qr// expression. This only confirms the general
  proverb : (??{}) assertions break lexicals.

  Michael G Schwern found that perl can't be compiled with -Dusemymalloc
  on Mac OS X. At least, it can't be compiled without further
  investigation.

  Alain Barbet and his smoke armada found problems with semaphores and
  NetBSD on sparc : they leak. Jarkko disables them. (bug #23216)

  Nicholas Clark and Abhijit Menon-Sen fixed a bug involving an
  unfortunate interaction between Storable and restricted hashes.

  Enache Adrian finds that using #line directives nukes the GvFILE slots
  of globs. Don't worry, apparently this only affects B::Bytecode -- but
  this prevents it completely from producing any accurate result.

  Abe Timmerman released Test-Smoke 1.18.02.

About this summary
  This week's yet another summary was 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 and corrections are welcome.