This Week on perl5-porters (17-23 November 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (17-23 November 2003)
    Due to my laziness, or perhaps to the lack of traffic on perl5-porters
    this week, this summary will be rather short, but hopefully long enough
    to provide your weekly dose of perl core information. Read on.

  Hash revamp
    Nicholas Clark proposes to refactor the code that manipulates hashes in
    the code ; and he does so.

    Before :

        http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-11/msg00759.html

    After :

        http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-11/msg00966.html

    He also fixed a remaining bug in the copy-on-write internal
    implementation (not enabled in default builds).

  More hashes
    Alan Burlison's module Solaris::Kstat, which implements a tied hash
    entirely in XS code. This module tends to dump cores with perl 5.8.2 ;
    this is due to the fact that its implementation clashes with the new
    restricted (read-only) hashes.

    Digging further, he notices that in perl 5.8.2, locking an empty hash
    produces a core dump, and provides a fix.

        http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-11/msg00694.html

  Non-hash stuff (or, In Brief, miscellaneous issues)
    Paul Szabo proposes a patch to solve some security issues in suidperl.
    Nobody comments.

        http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-11/msg00814.html

    Damian Menscher reports that under some conditions, running the perl
    test suite can change the file permissions for "/dev/tty". This
    unfortunate side-effect is filed under bug id #24521.

        http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-11/msg00849.html

    Moeller Wolf-Dietrich reports (bug #24508) a case where the
    concatenation operator has side-effects and produces the wrong result.
    Rafael fixes it by disabling a buggy optimization.

        http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-11/msg00799.html

    Salvador Fandiño posts a patch for MakeMaker, to add support for modules
    written in C++.

        http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-11/msg00924.html

    Chris Nandor reports that $^E, a system-specific equivalent for $!,
    sometimes changes unexpectedly. Dan Sugalski comments that, as it
    reflects the C variable "errno", it can change at any times, whenever a
    system call or another library function (such as malloc()) sets it.
    However, in this case, "errno" should be saved and restored when it's
    copied in the $^E scalar (this happens correctly for $!). Rafael fixes
    it.

        http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-11/msg00881.html

    Daniel Berger can't build a 64-bit perl on Solaris with gcc. Andy
    Dougherty provides a fix. (bug #24439.)

    Nicholas Clark wonders about the nuances involved in various ways of
    creating mortal scalars in the perl core. The answers involve
    archeology.

        http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-11/msg00831.html

    Leon Brocard is *getting confused about versions and Perl*, and asks for
    a more or less reliable way to sort versions. John Peacock suggests
    "version.pm".

        http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-11/msg00981.html

    Iain Truskett reorganizes a bit the documentation for PerlIO layers,
    which is shuffled between the perlrun and PerlIO man pages.

    Ton Hospel makes the regexp engine panic in 23 characters (bug #24524).

    Bug #24526 demonstrates that index() and rindex() still don't play nice
    with UTF-8 locales.

  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 (and patches) welcome.

• This Week on perl5-porters (17-23 November 2003) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez
• Re: This Week on perl5-porters (17-23 November 2003) by Enache Adrian