This Week on perl5-porters (12-18 May 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (12-18 May 2003)
  This week, discussions spawned across : manual pages, and their
  adaptation to perl's audience ; build problems ; interfaces ;
  conventions ; and the usual amount of bugs.

Working on man pages
  Shlomi Fish proposed successive incarnations of several patches to the
  perlsyn and perldata manpages. Casey West, Tom Christiansen, and others,
  commented.

  Looking at Shlomi's patches, Michael G Schwern noticed a lot of
  references to other languages in perl's core documentation -- mostly to
  Unixish little languages (sed and awk) and to C. In spite of their
  historical interest, those references are no longer relevant to most
  readers of those documents nowadays. So he decided to do something about
  it.

      http://xrl.us/h7g

  And by the way, while Casey posted a patch to replace all occurrences of
  "catenate" by "concatenate", Tom explained the subtle difference between
  those two words.

      http://xrl.us/h7h

A new version of Getopt::Long
  Johan Vromans uploaded to the CPAN an alpha version of his module
  Getopt::Long (2.32_03) which implemented automatic support for --version
  and --help flags (based on a patch by Ilya Zakharevich). Quoting the
  announcement : "Since this is a non-compatible API change, the new
  features will only be available to programs that explicitly require
  version 2.3203 or later."

  This unconventional way to enable these new features was discussed and
  adapted, after the problems it caused were sorted out.

      http://xrl.us/h7i

  For the latest state of the module (2.32_05), see :

      http://xrl.us/h7j
      http://search.cpan.org/src/JV/Getopt-Long-2.32_05/CHANGES

Build problems
  Gerrit P. Haase and H. Merijn Brand were investigating build problems
  under the latest snapshots of the Cygwin environment (1.5.0s). At some
  point they suspected a broken header file, but the problem seems to be
  deeper. Anyway, bleadperl builds (almost) correctly on the more stable
  Cygwin 1.3.22.

  Enache Adrian tried to build bleadperl on Windows 2000 with MS Visual C.
  He gets several failures, and also reminds us about bug #21473
  (sysread() and syswrite() don't process CRLF correctly).

      http://xrl.us/h7k

  Alain Barbet gets smoke failures, building perl on NetBSD on a Sparc 64
  hardware, but apparently upgrading gcc helps a lot. He's going to try
  with the very recent gcc 3.3, that has also been installed by Merijn on
  his smoke systems. However, perl + long doubles still fails on AIX 4.3.3
  with this latest compiler.

Multidimensional array emulation
  David Nicol remarks that the (little-known) multidimensional array
  emulation works when written $hash{$x,$y}, but not in the construct
  $hash{@array}. That's because the subscript must be a list, so it's
  necessary to employ some syntactic trick, as $hash{@array,()} to get it
  working.

      http://xrl.us/h7l

  Later, Rafael asks whether this feature should be deprecated, and after
  discussion, the answer appears to be no.

      http://xrl.us/h7m

Alpha version numbers
  Elaine Ashton noticed that "the documented method of denoting an alpha
  module release and the way that PAUSE and search denote them do not
  match". This remark was triggered by the upload on CPAN of a module that
  has a X_YY-style version number. search.cpan.org understands this to
  be an alpha version number, while PAUSE, for doing so, requires that the
  distribution filename matches /d\.\d+_\d/, and moreover it looks into
  the module(s) for $VERSION scalars.

      http://xrl.us/h7n

In brief
  Back in January, Jarkko Hietaniemi asked for a couple of new README
  documents, README.macosx and README.linux. But they were never written.
  Perhaps before 5.8.1 ?

  Jarkko also released a maintenance snapshot, and he asked, for the last
  time, for a list of most wanted fixes to go in 5.8.1.

  Tassilo von Parseval, who remarked last month that h2xs was not able
  to handle C enums, proposed a patch for it. It adds an
  -e/--omit-enums command-line option, to disable the proposed new
  default behavior, that is to process enums. (Bug #21887.)

  Ilya Sandler reported bug #22181, a case of core-dump involving a
  combination of foreach() and goto(). Dave Mitchell and Enache Adrian
  hunted it down.

  Dave Mitchell remarked that the construct $hash{$foo}, where $foo is
  undefined, doesn't give a warning when %hash is empty. That would be a
  bug.

  Michael Fowler reported a weird parsing bug (#22231) caused by the
  presence of the Switch module in a program, and of a comment
  containing the word "switch".

  MIME::Base64 was upgraded.

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 (12-18 May 2003) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez
• Re: This Week on perl5-porters (12-18 May 2003) by Tassilo von Parseval