This Week on perl5-porters (19-25 January 2004)

This Week on perl5-porters (19-25 January 2004)
  Another summary this week, not really different from the previous ones,
  as it contains the usual bug reports and other discussions. The bugs,
  however, are new. Read below.

On the order of arguments to "Exporter"
  Mark-Jason Dominus reports that you can't write

      use Fcntl "O_RDONLY", ":flock";

  because "Exporter" will think that ":flock" is the name of a symbol to
  be imported, not of a group of symbols. (bug #25160.) H. Merijn Brand
  committed a patch to change this.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-25160-71481.14.1614537314423%40perl.org

The dor patch to 5.8.3
  H. Merijn Brand uploaded the defined-or patch against 5.8.3 to CPAN
  (which adds to it the "//" and "err" operators that exist in bleadperl).
  However, it contained a minor error, causing the output of "perl -V" not
  to include the proper *Locally applied patches* section. As PAUSE
  doesn't let people upload the same file twice, Merijn deleted the first
  patch and uploaded a new one under the name dor-5.8.3a.diff, which can
  be found in his CPAN directory (HMBRAND).

In Brief
  Leon Brocard released a snapshot of perl 5.005_04 :

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040121100937.GA8793%40kanga.astray.com

  Some progress was made on the Storable module. Stas Bekman sent a patch
  to make it thread-safe. Moreover, Sam Vilain fixed a case of
  segmentation fault (bug #25145).

  Stas wants the strategies used to handle memory allocations on Windows
  to be improved, esp. where ithreads are involved. Jan Dubois is working
  on it, but issues are complex.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=400DEA8A.8020208%40stason.org

  Alan Burlison points out an error in the documentation of threads
  pertaining to the interaction of threading with forking. Also, he notes
  that an explicit unlock() would be more flexible than the implicit
  unlock-at-end-of-scope that happens currently.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4013DFA9.5030008%40sun.com

  Steve Hay proposed a patch to add a camel icon to perl.exe on Windows.

  David Jantzen reports (bug #25237) that perl leaks memory when
  recursively traversing circular datastructures. Dave Mitchell explains
  that he managed somehow to *create a closure which closes over itself*.
  So leakage is to be expected.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-25237-72009.6.72018147677328%40perl.org

Bugs fixed
  Gisle Aas reported that the simple statement

      print if foo

  doesn't die under strictures (bug #25147). This was fixed by Dave
  Mitchell.

  The constructs

      sub foo : unique {}
      my $x : unique;

  are now disallowed in bleadperl (until someone comes up with a sensible
  signification for them.)

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24940-70133.7.7098418042744%40perl.org

  Detached threads now work on Windows, thanks to Jan Dubois. They used to
  crash on interpreter exit.

About this summary
  This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are
  published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which
  subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Corrections
  and comments are welcome.

• This Week on perl5-porters (19-25 January 2004) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez