This Week on perl5-porters (24-30 November 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (24-30 November 2003)

  A quiet week for the Perl 5 porters, but some threads are worth noting.
  Notably, I have now a reason to mention Leon Brocard in the summary
  without appealing to any running joke.

New Pumpking crowned
  Leon Brocard is now the pumpking for the 5.005xx maintainance branch of
  perl. The plan for 5.00504 is roughly the same than the plan for 5.6.2 :
  build fixes for new platforms.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031126145110.GA28063%40perlsupport.com

sprintf and long doubles
  Ilya Zakharevich's patch to speed up "sprintf()" with floating point
  values and a fixed number of digits was found to cause a different
  result than perl's regular "sprintf()" with a perl configured with long
  doubles. Rafael disabled part of the optimization in this case.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031124070834.GA1658%40ratsnest.hole

DynaLoader and PAR
  Edward S. Peschko proposed a patch to "DynaLoader" to store the names of
  the shared object files loaded by perl. As he says, it's *intended for
  use with PAR (for run time detection of shared objects rather than
  compile time analysis)*.

  Rafael points out a little problem -- the array storing file names
  should be ":shared" among threads -- an another one, due to the fact
  that the shared object files loaded via "XSLoader" aren't recorded here
  either. Nick Ing-Simmons gives an alternative way to get the file names
  from the module names given in @DynaLoader::dl_modules.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031125041718.GB15868%40mdssdev05.comp.pge.com

Exporter::import
  A patch by Fergal Daly to implement

      use Exporter ´import';

  was applied ; this allows a package to get Exporter's import() method
  without all the fuss of inheriting from Exporter.

Clarifications about closures
  Glenn Linderman asked some questions about lexical variables, pragmas,
  eval() and closures. Dave Mitchell, while noting that the current
  documentation needs to be completed, provided some insight.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3FC3D338.606%40nevcal.com

In Brief
  Mike Pomraning proposed a patch to add a new, optional second parameter
  to "threads::shared::cond_wait()", to be used as a separate lock
  variable.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=Pine.LNX.4.58.0311232311320.5397%40localhost.localdomain

  Shlomi Fish finds that perl's core documentation is of poor quality,
  compared to the online documentation for other languages. He wants to
  start a project to improve them. This starts a long thread, probably due
  to the irritating manner he sometimes has to state things.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=Pine.LNX.4.56.0311271106250.29160%40vipe.technion.ac.il

  Test::Harness 2.38 was integrated in bleadperl. It provides a new
  standalone "prove" utility, to run tests against Test::Harness.

      http://search.cpan.org/~petdance/Test-Harness-2.38/bin/prove

  Just in time for the summary, Nicholas Clark released a snapshot of
  maintperl, Sunday at 23:59 +0000.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031130235945.GB23801%40plum.flirble.org

  POSIX::isalpha(undef) (and the other isXXX() functions) segfault, as of
  perl 5.8.2 (bug #24554). Sadahiro Tomoyuki provided a fix.

Christmas in advance for the bug admins
  Thanks to Robert Spier, perlbug has been updated to the latest version
  of Request Tracker, RT 3.

About this summary
  This summary was brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly
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  Feedback (and patches) welcome.