This Week on perl5-porters (22-28 September 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (22-28 September 2003)
  Perl 5.8.1 was released. 'Nuff said.

The Release
  Jarkko Hietaniemi began the week by releasing the last candidate, perl
  5.8.1 RC 5, which was extensively tested on all available platforms and
  with lots of CPAN modules.

  Then, three days later, he finally uploaded the final tarball of 5.8.1
  to the CPAN, leaving for a well-deserved vacation, applauded by the
  whole crew for his wonderful job.

      The Official Announcement : http://xrl.us/uoz

  Jarkko retiring from pumpkineering (a word that ispell must be told
  about), Nicholas Clark is now the new 5.8.x maintenance pumpking. Public
  acclamations.

      The Plan for 5.8.x : http://xrl.us/uo7

Phalanx
  Andy Lester announced the Phalanx project, aimed at creating a solid
  testing base for Perl 5 and Ponie, through extensive tests of the most
  important CPAN modules.

      http://xrl.us/uwf
      http://qa.perl.org/phalanx/

-i and symbolic links
  Pekka Savola reports (bug #24000) that when perl is given the "-i"
  switch (in place edition of input files), the symbolic links are
  replaced by modified plain files, but the file they point to is not
  modified. Although perl could be made to edit the linked files through
  @ARGV modification, it's not clear what kind of DWIMmery should be
  implemented here by default, the old one being at least
  backwards-compatible. Aaron Sherman points out that the behavioral
  change would be better done at the C level, and not via an error-prone
  perl module (due to symlink chains and other relative pathnames
  madness).

      http://xrl.us/uwg

Overloading log()
  Tels reports that it's not possible to overload log() (via the
  "overload" pragma) and make it accept more than one parameter. (Bug
  #24016). Rafael suggests to define an overriding log() subroutine
  instead. Mark-Jason Dominus gives further details.

      http://xrl.us/uwh

The :locked attribute
  Elizabeth Mattijsen notices that the :locked subroutine attribute,
  documented in the "attributes" manpage, is relevant only to the old
  5005threads model. Then she makes a patch to turn it into a compile-time
  error if used with ithreads, intended to go in 5.8.x. But support for
  :locked should be completely removed from the 5.9.x branch, as
  5005threads are no longer supported.

      http://xrl.us/uwi

Readonly local values
  The code snipped that was posted last week by Stas Bekman and that
  produced a "Modification of a read-only value attempted" error in
  bleadperl is now permitted again. Rafael fixed it in a way that, when a
  magic variable is localized, the readonly flag is propagated *only* if
  its kind of magic can handle value affectations. This should protect
  from bugs as well as minimizing the annoyance for the programmer.

In Brief
  Rick Delaney proposed a patch to fix the behaviour of require() setting
  or not setting keys in %INC when it tries to load a module that has
  compilation errors. His patch arranges for failures to be cached in %INC
  as undefined values.

  Mark-Jason Dominus reports that overloaded operators don't seem to work
  with blessed functions (bug #24033). Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes explains
  that the issue is that the overload magic flag is on the reference, not
  on the referent.

  David Buckley reported a couple of segfault cases in Data::Dumper,
  involving threads and/or large recursive structures (bugs #23965 and
  #24013).

  Gabor Szabo looks for the P5P FAQ. The old FAQ Simon Cozens crafted is
  now outdated. Rafael promises to update it, and Robert Spier to upload
  it to http://dev.perl.org/.

  Tels released Math::BigInt 1.66, just in time for 5.8.1.

About this summary
  This week's summary was produced 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@perl.org. Corrections
  and comments are welcome. Next week, I'll take a break, and will be
  kindly replaced by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

• This Week on perl5-porters (22-28 September 2003) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez
• Re: This Week on perl5-porters (22-28 September 2003) by Elizabeth Mattijsen