This Week on perl5-porters (3-9 February 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (3-9 February 2003)
  I'm not sure whether it's me or if the Perl 5 porters discussions were
  actually a bit shorter than usual, but this week's summary, indeed,
  appears to be a bit shorter than usual. This doesn't mean that it's
  absolutely without interest.

Maintenance releases
  Leon Brocard asked for the expected availability of the 5.005_04 and
  5.6.2 releases. Notably, there are known fixes to allow building perl
  5.005_03 and 5.6.1 with the newest versions of gcc and of the Berkeley
  DB. Gurusamy Sarathy intends to release a 5.6.2, and adds that smoke
  tests results are welcome. Tim Bunce and Nicholas Clark add that *it's
  important that the Perl community be seen to actively support at least
  one previous major version.*

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg91424.html

Reducing op size
  Stephen McCamant provided some ideas about removing the op_seq field
  from the op node structure (more precisely, to reduce it to two flags).
  An op could be reasonably identified by a couple (address, checksum of
  fields). He also sent a patch for B::Concise to remove its dependency on
  op_seq.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg91553.html

Seeking a safe signal test
  Jarkko Hietaniemi proposes to add a new magic variable ${^SIGNAL_UNSAFE}
  (or something) to restore locally the pre-5.8.0 "unsafe" signal behavior
  when set to a true value.

  He asks whether someone could provide *sample code of where the safe
  signals "reliably" gets it wrong*, to be used as a basis for tests for
  this new feature. To be noted, this kind of tests are extremely
  dependent on the platform.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg91763.html

In brief
  Robert Spier posted a handy list of untouched bugs, alongside his weekly
  perlbug summary. He says that *a bunch of em look easy*, and I feel
  guilty : he's right.

  Dustin Jones reports an interesting parser bug (#20716) : the lexical $x
  in the double-quoted string below is not seen by perl :

      my $x = 'x'; print "${x}{";

  (removing the "my" solves the problem.) Enache Adrian provided a fix.

  Dan Kogai reported that formats don't seem to play well with PerlIO and
  Unicode strings. This didn't surprise Jarkko. Inaba Hiroto proposed some
  patches to fix this.

  Enache Adrian was busy solving several bugs related to "goto" :
  segfaults (#20154, #20357) and a newly discovered memory leak (#20777).

  Ton Hospel reported three new regular expressions bugs (if I count
  correctly).

  Abigail requests that Test::Harness should provide a way to be
  optionally silenced. Currently it prints a string for each test ran (the
  counter.) This may take some time for large test suites.

  H. Merijn Brand reports that Cygwin v1.3.20 now has nanosleep() and that
  bleadperl successfully compiles and passes all tests on it.

About this summary
  This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries are
  available on http://use.perl.org/ and/or via a mailing list, which
  subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Comments and
  corrections are welcome.

• This Week on perl5-porters (3-9 February 2003) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez