This Week on perl5-porters (11-17 August 2003)
The next maintenance release of Perl approaches, but the porters want to
take the time to do it right. Meanwhile, discussions and bug reports
continue to occur, as usual. Read about new and old documentation,
valgrind, backwards [in]compatibility, and other stuff.
Manpages
The perlreftut manpage is currently distributed with Perl under a
restrictive license that doesn't make it completely freely
redistributable and that is apparently not compliant with the Debian
Free Software Guidelines. Its copyright is currently owned by The Perl
Journal, but Mark-Jason Dominus (author of this document) is trying to
obtain it. If he succeeds he will rerelease it under a more standard
license.
http://xrl.us/pxb
Meanwhile, a new manpage, perlcheat (the perl cheat sheet), crafted by
Juerd, was added to the perl core documentation.
valgrinding
Jarkko Hietaniemi added a "test.valgrind" make target, to run the core
test suite under valgrind, a memory access debugger for Linux/x86. This
shakes out some errors, indicating potential or actual bugs.
http://xrl.us/pxc
valgrind : http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/
Warnings
Elizabeth Mattijsen is heavily testing the perl 5.8.1 release candidates
with her thread (and non-thread) modules. She's able to produce error
messages like "Attempt to free unreferenced scalar" or "Scalars leaked"
-- notably with the Thread::Tie and Thread::Pool modules.
She also notes that, now that warnings are automatically enabled when
running tests (unless otherwise specified), test suites that used to
seem perfectly working could be now proven flawed. (Not mentioning
potential failures due to random hash key ordering.)
http://xrl.us/pxd
PerlIO layers
Stas Bekman, facing a problem with the handling of STDIN and STDOUT with
mod_perl 2 when there are PerlIO layers pushed on those handles, asks
for a way to replace the worker PerlIO layer. Nick Ing-Simmons explains
some of the details about the PerlIO internals.
http://xrl.us/pxe
Scripts for porters
Jarkko decided that it would be a good thing to bump up all version
numbers of core modules that have changed since 5.8.0. Slaven Rezic
provided a script to find in two Perl source trees modules that have
changed but have the same version numbers. (Slaven also wrote another
script to identify all modules with a dual life on CPAN, whose
Makefile.PL's do not contain something like "INSTALLDIRS => perl".
Jarkko also asked for a script to regenerate [parts of] all files that
use a list of the standard documentation pod files (various makefiles,
table of contents generator, etc.) Nicholas Clark studied the problem
and posted the state of his unfinished work so far.
http://xrl.us/pxf
In Brief
Rafael Garcia-Suarez asks for more regression tests, notably for some of
the basic parts of the interpreter that might be undertested and/or
undocumented (for example, numeric/string conversion). This would most
probably be useful for Ponie.
http://xrl.us/pxg
Abigail finds that the snippet $x=~(0,0) produces an obscure error
message : "Too many arguments for regexp internal reset". (Bug #23328).
But should it be a syntax error at all ?
Alan Burlison, who set up an impressive smoke suite on several different
Solaris boxes, gets random failures from them : some of them were
apparently cured by using a non-parallel make for "make _test".
Hugo explained why some long-deprecated features are not likely to be
removed.
http://xrl.us/pxh
gcc 3.3.1 was released ; it doesn't seem to cause major problems.
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 perl5-summary-subscribe@xxxxxxxxx Corrections
and comments are welcome.
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