This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 March 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 March 2003)
  It's back, it's back, the weekly P5P summary, after two weeks of
  vacation.

Pseudo-hash deprecation
  Jarkko Hietaniemi asks the gang about the pseudo-hash deprecation in
  perl 5.8.1. Currently, with maintperl, a deprecation warning is issued
  whenever a pseudo-hash is accessed. This warning is not triggered by
  pseudo-hash creation, because the "fields" pragma still legitimately
  creates pseudo-hashes. However, the return value of "fields::new", when
  used, will thus warn, being a (blessed) pseudo-hash. This is annoying,
  because this very warning will disappear with perl 5.9.0, where
  pseudo-hashes have been removed, and where "fields" uses restricted
  hashes instead of pseudo-hashes.

  Jarkko wondered whether the best solution would be to backport the
  restricted-hash-based "fields" implementation in 5.8.1. Nicholas Clark
  worries about backward compatibility. Rafael Garcia-Suarez proposes an
  alternative solution, more conservative : to issue the deprecation
  warning only when accessing unblessed pseudo-hashes. The discussion
  continues.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93050.html

Posixly////
  A smoke run on bsdos 4.1 reminds us that, while POSIX requires trailing
  slashes to be ignored on the arguments to system calls that represent
  directories, this is not always implemented by the operating systems.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93139.html

Imaginary signals
  Rafael added a test to lib/Config.t to check that all signal numbers
  found by the Configure script are positive. Unfortunately, signal
  numbers may actually be, very legitimately, negative : e.g. on HP-UX
  10.20. Jarkko then fixed Configure to ignore negative signal numbers,
  and put in a couple of other corrections, too.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93174.html

More briefly
  Stas Bekman asked how to emulate an "eval {}" block in XS code.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93048.html

  Hugo van der Sanden and David Dyck are trying to find the cause of a
  segfault that occurs with Parse::RecDescent under bleadperl (but not
  under perl 5.8.0). This bug prevents Inline::C from working with
  bleadperl.

  Jos Boumans is setting up smoke boxes. He gave up installing
  Darwin/Intel, an OS which appears to be more alpha than bleadperl.

  Fergal Daly sent several bug-fix patches for Test::More.

  Jerrad Pierce is working on the FileCache module.

  Abigail finds out that localizing elements from the @_ array doesn't
  work quite right. I'm not really surprised. Bug #21542.

  Hiroo Hayashi proposes a patch for the FILE* typemap of Perl 5.8.0, to
  prevent segfaults with "FileHandle"s in certain conditions. I'm not sure
  I understand all the issues here. The relevant RT bug id is #21549.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93145.html

  Tim Maher reports that Regexp::Common and Filter::Simple can't be
  apparently used together (bug #21574).

  Philippe 'BooK' Bruhat reports an amusing parser bug, #21575, about a
  lexical hash variable being suddenly understood as package-wise when
  used in a weirdly-indented print() statement. A couple of hours later,
  Enache Adrian comes up with a fix.

  Hugo asks why the one-liner :

      perl -le 'print $a++'

  prints "0". Abigail doesn't find this behavior strange, and (as
  expected) has "written code that depends on this". The discussion
  continues.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93265.html

About this summary
  This summary was 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.

  I'd like to thank everyone who provided support and encouragements.
  Without them, I wouldn't have continued to write these summaries.
  Enjoy !

• This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 March 2003) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez
• Re: This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 March 2003) by Abigail
• Re: This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 March 2003) by H.Merijn Brand
• Re: This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 March 2003) by Enache Adrian
• Re: This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 March 2003) by Abigail
• Re: This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 March 2003) by H.Merijn Brand
• Re: This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 March 2003) by Philip Newton
• Re: This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 March 2003) by Enache Adrian