This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 May 2004)

This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 May 2004)
  Welcome to our latest edition of the P5P summary, for which I'm sure you
  have been waiting. This week, you'll read about considerations on
  Storable, nice improvements to the debugger, bugs, and other interesting
  subjects.

Storable and memory usage
  Richard Jelinek was wondering about the reason why the Storable module
  sometimes uses so much memory when large hashes are stored. Nicholas
  Clark explained some of the inner workings of Storable, which needs to
  keep track of every element it stores, in order to avoid duplicates; and
  he suggests that maybe using a DB file would be a better idea.
  Mark-Jason Dominus suggests to add an option to Storable to avoid the
  duplicate check; this would reduce memory consumption, at the expense of
  cloning the data structures at retrieval-time.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040514211002.A21640%40petamem.com

Stepping backwards
  Richard Foley sent a patch to implement backwards stepping in the perl
  debugger. He explains: "Stepping backwards is made possible by using a
  true history (earlier save command), and rerunning the debugger to the
  indicated command, or to so-many steps backwards, or to the current
  position."

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200405111104.11484.richard.foley%40rfi.net

Command-line options
  Jim Cromie supplied a patch to provide an explanation for the "-D"
  debugging command-line switch, when it's invoked with wrong suboptions.

  He also added some search options for the "-V:" option, which enables to
  search through perl's configuration variables.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40A06F92.1070607%40divsol.com

Regexp bug
  Til Schubbe found a regexp bug (#29538). He provides the example of a
  regular expression that behaves correctly with "/i", but not without,
  even though there is no letter in the regexp. Jeff Pinyan provided some
  technical analysis, but no fix (yet).

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.9-29538-87310.6.72801110403121%40perl.org

Encoding and CRLF files on windows
  Jan Dubois notices that one cannot write a file in some encodings on
  Windows (with the example of "ucs2le") because the output file will be
  corrupted by spurious CRLF end-of-line conversions. (The ":crlf" layer
  is present by default under Windows.) Adding a ":raw" PerlIO layer is
  necessary to get the correct final encoding.

  Dan Kogai comments that UCS-2 should always be treated as binary, which
  sounds like a sane idea.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200405150041.i4F0fQjh003739%40smtp3.ActiveState.com

In Brief
  Rafael patched XSLoader to record the paths of loaded .so files in
  @DynaLoader::dl_shared_objects.

  Encode 2.00 was released by Dan Kogai. In spite of the name, that's not
  a new major version release, that's only 1.99++ :)

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. Comments and
  corrections welcome.

• This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 May 2004) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez