This Week on perl5-porters (5-11 May 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (5-11 May 2003)
  Summary of this week's summary : scoops about RedHat 9 ; the possible
  future of CPAN packaging ; some overloading ; old and new error messages ;
  Windows killing ; and other interesting stuff.

MakeMaker and RedHat 9
  Michael G Schwern currently gets a load of bug reports about MakeMaker
  not working on RedHat 9. This is because RedHat 9 ships with a snapshot
  of the maintenance branch of perl, which corrects some of the
  UTF8-related bugs, but unfortunately one of the remaining bugs "seems to
  bite MakeMaker especially bad", as says Jarkko.

  The workaround is to set the environment variable "LANG" to "C" before
  building a module.

      http://xrl.us/hwk

External dependencies of CPAN distributions
  Stas Bekman initiated another of those long, difficult-to-summarize
  (but-nevertheless-interesting) threads about possible enhancements to
  the way to build, distribute, install and upgrade modules. This time
  Stas tells us about the problem of incompatible upgrades, that occurs
  when a package Foo goes from version 1.XX to 2.00, with incompatible API
  changes, and thus being not suitable for upgrade for all users. (A good
  example would be mod_perl 1.XX vs. mod_perl 2.0.)

  Andreas Koenig says that this problem can't be solved without a major
  redesign of the indexing process, but that bundles can be used to solve
  this class of problems.

  Ken Williams provided some insight about what kind of metadata about
  external dependencies could be embedded in distributions.

  Autrijus Tang and Brian Ingerson give some interesting spoilers about
  the soon-to-be-released "Module::Install" framework. Or should I say
  virus ?

      http://xrl.us/hwl

CORE::readline() calls overloaded <>
  Christian Jaeger reported (bug #22042) that, when the <> operator has
  been overloaded for a class Foo, calling CORE::readline() on a object of
  this class calls the overloaded function. Rafael Garcia-Suarez showed
  that a similar behavior occurs for int(), and explained why he thinks
  it's not a bug.

      http://xrl.us/hwm

Destruction uses too much memory
  Ton Hospel produced a core dump (bug #22095) by building a large double
  linked list and destroying it. This is due to a hard stack overflow. Ton
  suggested that there's some recursion occurring during refcount
  decrement inside the perl interpreter, and that (1) replacing the
  recursion by an iterative algorithm would be a gain, (2) that each step
  of recursion uses probably too much memory. As said Arthur, patches are
  welcome.

      http://xrl.us/hwo

Making tests run anywhere
  The test suite for perl currently modifies @INC to be sure to always
  include the modules from the perl being built. Ilya Zakharevich proposed
  to make this behavior dependent on a "NO_PERL_CORE" environment
  variable. The goal is to be able to run the test suite against an
  installed perl, and optionally to unbundle the test suite. Rafael
  recalls that t/TEST already includes support to run the test suite using
  an arbitrary perl interpreter, via the "PERL" environment variable.

      http://xrl.us/hwp

Old bugs, new fixes
  Casey West continues his journey through the bug database, fixing
  documentation as he finds doc bugs. He's not the only one that visits
  perlbug : Dave Mitchell, for example, reduced old bug #3420 to the
  amusing snippet

      $ perl -Te '@{%h}{x}'
      Bizarre copy of HASH in leave at -e line 1.

  and explained what happens here, but he doesn't know how to fix it.

Error messages, added and removed
  Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes added a new fatal error (and fixed bug #17718 by
  doing so) :

      Can't provide tied hash usage; use keys(%hash) to test if empty

  And here's the explanation : you probably know that a hash, evaluated in
  scalar context, provides bucket usage :

      $ perl -le '%h=(1..6);print scalar %h'
      3/8

  As an empty hash returns 0 here, this can be used to test hashes for
  emptiness. But this operation can't be done on tied hashes, and returned
  until now unreliable data. Thus, tied hashes are no more allowed in
  scalar context. This modification will probably be part of perl 5.8.1 as
  well.

  Meanwhile, Rafael removed two unnecessary error messages : "Final @
  should be \@ or @name" and "Final % should be \% or %name". (The second
  one wasn't even documented in the perldiag manpage.)

  In warnings land : Dave Mitchell proposed to add the name of the
  offending variable to the well-known "use of undefined value" warning
  (when possible and reasonably easy).

Killing processes on Windows
  Daniel Berger proposed an alternative implementation of kill() on Win32
  systems. Gurusamy Sarathy and Jan Dubois provided some insightful
  comments.

      http://xrl.us/hwq

About this summary
  This summary was brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly
  summaries are available on <http://use.perl.org/> and via a mailing
  list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org.
  Feedback is (as always) welcome.

• This Week on perl5-porters (5-11 May 2003) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez