This Week on perl5-porters (18-24 August 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (18-24 August 2003)
  The Perl 5 porters are rather focused on perl 5.8.1 tuning and
  adjustments. Smokes, valgrind checks, modules updates, and regression
  bug hunting were among the main events of the week.

DESTROYing blessed code refs
  Last year, Simon Cozens found that blessed code references weren't
  DESTROYed properly (bug #10030). Dave Mitchell looked at it, and
  diagnosed that it's caused by the fact that the blessed anonymous
  subroutine is not a closure (usually) -- and indeed, turning it into a
  closure fixes the behaviour of the destructor. Dave thinks that this bug
  would be inefficient to fix, and suggests to document it as a
  misfeature.

  Later in the thread, the proper meaning of the "closure" word is
  discussed.

      http://xrl.us/qr5

More valgrinding
  Last week, Jarkko Hietaniemi added to the test harness the possibility
  to run the test suite under valgrind. This week, helped by Marcus
  Holland-Moritz and other members of the crowd, he slightly tweaked
  valgrind's setup to produce more useful and accurate reports. Some
  interesting bugs are shaked out.

      http://xrl.us/qr6

Localization of $|
  Stas Bekman found a new bug in the localization of the $| variable. This
  bug wasn't present in perl 5.8.0, and causes significant problems with
  mod_perl 2. Dave Mitchell identified himself as the guilty patcher,
  explained the problem, and provided a better version of his original
  patch.

      http://xrl.us/qr7

In Brief
  Jari Aalto wishes that here-documents could be declared with the quote
  operators syntax, as in : <<q(FOO), <<qq(BAR), etc. (bug #23348).
  This doesn't seem to be unreasonable.

  Tassilo von Parseval added to Devel::PPPort, the backward compatibility
  wrapper for XS code, some adapters for the "grok_*" functions, that
  convert strings to numbers. (See a recent perlapi manpage for the
  description of those functions.)

  Enache Adrian fixed the handling of utf-8 strings in error messages.

  Richard Dawe provided a portability patch for perl 5.6.2 on DJGPP.
  Philip Newton is testing perl 5.8.1 on DJGPP as well.

  Michael G Schwern cleaned up a bit Pod::Html.

Smoke news
  Alain (alian) Barbet was busy on the portability front. He found out
  that some pack() tests fails on NetBSD/sparc, compiled with gcc 2.x.
  This is apparently due (after investigating with Nicholas Clark) to a
  bug in "**". (bug #23463).

  Alain also released a new version of his Test-Smoke-Database
  distribution on CPAN, a software that presents and summarizes smoke
  results via a web interface.

  Abigail started to produce smoke results for perl 5.6.2. One of the
  tests for int() fails when perl 5.6.2 is compiled with 64 bit
  arithmetic, due to a transitional known bug in his version of glibc. (A
  workaround for this bug was put in perl 5.8.0.)

Module news
  Dan Kogai released Encode 1.98. Michael Schwern released
  ExtUtils::MakeMaker 6.16. And I see on CPAN that CGI.pm 3.00 is out.

  Moreover, Ken Williams proposed to backport Cwd to CPAN, with the recent
  tainting fixes in it.

      http://xrl.us/qr4

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

--