This Week on perl5-porters (16-22 January 2006)

This Week on perl5-porters - 16-22 January 2006

"Class::Autouse" test fails on "blead"

   "Class::Autouse" allows you to defer the loading of a class until you
   actually get around to calling a method belonging to it, and the test
   suite checks what happens when the class to be "use"d cannot be
   compiled. The test that used to work, worked no longer, and Adam
   Kennedy, the author, was wondering what changes had occurred in
   "bleadperl" that could explain the problem.

   Nicholas tracked it down to change #25599, a fix by Rafael
   Garcia-Suarez for the bug that caused "CORE::require" to ignore the
   "CORE::". (That is, if "require" was overridden, there was no way to
   specify the underlying "require"). Rafael fixed the fix in fix #26881.

     Class::Autouse
     http://search.cpan.org/dist/Class-Autouse/

     Squash a bug, get a new one free
     http://xrl.us/jqvn

Cached %ENV on cygwin

   Tim Bunce dropped in with a bug that cropped up on the "dbi-dev"
   mailing list, someone having trouble getting "DBD::Oracle" and Cygwin
   playing nicely together, and offered his theory about what was going
   wrong. Andy Hassall correlated that with a message on a Cygwin
   development list and confirmed Tim's theory.

   Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes didn't have time to look at the code, but
   offered some tips on how to restructure the test suite to work around
   the limitation (which is, to quote Tim, that manipulating %ENV doesn't
   alter the process's own environment variables until a subprocess is
   spawned).

     Too clever by half
     http://xrl.us/jqvo

Dead part of constant expression is nonconstant

   Gisle Aas reported that the Sun C compiler spits out endless "dead
   part of constant expression is nonconstant" warnings when the macro
   "Newx" is encountered in the source, and wondered what to do about it.
   It is in fact a compiler bug. Alan Burlison had filed a bug report
   with the Sun group and had updated perlsolaris.pod with the workaround
   (adding a switch to ignore the warning in question, pending resolution
   of the bug in the compiler).

   Gisle evidently thought that this was a suboptimal hack, and rewrote
   part of the macros guts in a new way, replacing a ternary by a series
   of logical ands, thus making the warning disappear altogether. Alan
   was impressed.

     Gisle in action
     http://xrl.us/jqvp

"until ()" is not like "while ()"

   John Nurick wondered in bug #38254 why "while ()" behaves like "while
   (1)", but "until ()" won't compile. He pointed out that making "until
   ()" equivalent to "until (1)" would be quite useless (as useless as
   "while (0)"), but a good case could be made for making it equivalent
   to "until (0)".

   Yizchak showed that "until ( () )" worked as expected (if slightly
   non-obvious), but otherwise no lexer wizards chose to come up with a
   two-line patch to make Perl DWIM.

     A call to orthogonality
     http://xrl.us/jqvq

Another "defined %foo::" bugfix

   Rafael found another problem pertaining to "defined %foo::" by smoking
   Inline. The following no longer worked:

     package test;
     sub import { print defined %some::random::stash:: ? "not ok" : 
"ok", "\n" }
     1;

   And fixed it up with a short, sharp patch (#26867).

     Always test scary modules before a release
     http://xrl.us/jqvr

Documentation discrepancy over "-DPERL_EMERGENCY_SBRK"

   Stas Bekman noted that it is possible to set aside an emergency pool
   of memory so that perl could do something useful after "die"ing, and
   perlvar.pod explains how to set it up. On the other hand, the INSTALL
   file fails to make any mention of it and wondered what was the best
   thing to do about it. Rafael committed change #26878 to clarify the
   issue.

     Save some for later
     http://xrl.us/jqvs

Impossible seeming bug

   Hal Morris tripped if the "if(0)/elsif(0==undef)" bug (the reported
   line number being that of the "if", not the "elsif". The is because of
   the way the internal representation of the program discards the
   information concerning the line number of the "elsif". When a problem
   occurs, the line number of the "if" is all that remains, so that is
   what is used in the warning message.

   Paul Johnson wished it was fixed, because it would make
   "Devel::Cover"'s branch and condition coverage easier to understand.
   David Landgren pointed to the previous thread on the matter.

     This can't be right
     http://xrl.us/jqvt

     Nor was it back then
     http://xrl.us/jqvu

"Pod::Simple::Search" and non-case-preserving filesystems

   Allison Randal cast her attention to a late-December post from Craig
   Berry, who was having trouble with "Pod::Simple::Search" on VMS and
   had supplied a patch to resolve the problems he had encountered
   (relating to the fact that FOO and foo can refer to the same file).

   Allison gave details of three minor problems she had encountered with
   the patch, proposed fixes and asked if Craig could verify the
   correctness on VMS, which would allow her to release 3.04.

   Craig took Allison's amendments for a spin, ironed out a few kinks and
   gave it the thumbs up.

     Shiny cross-platform goodness
     http://xrl.us/jqvv

Avoiding realloc

   Nicholas Clark had a look at way perl allocates memory for scalars. Up
   until now the exact size has always been requested, and the allocated
   size is recorded. This helps avoid unnecessary trips to the heap when
   a string shrinks and then grows yet stays within the size of the
   original allocation.

   On the assumption that "malloc" implementations silently round up
   anyway, because it simplifies the internal bookkeeping, it makes sense
   to round up the requested size silently on perl's side anyway, because
   then scalars that creep a little bit past the initial requested size
   might still remain within the initial requested size, thereby avoiding
   a costly "realloc".

   Nicholas then set about trying to determine the exact number of bytes
   that are in fact allocated for all small allocation values (where
   small means between 1 and 256). It turns out that a brute force "round
   up to nearest multiple of 4 on a 32-bit CPU" rule wasn't particularly
   effective. "malloc" sometimes allocates much more, especially on
   FreeBSD. Nicholas wanted to know whether it would be worth the effort
   to probe for these sizes at "Configure" time, build a lookup table,
   and tweak the already monstrous "PERL_STRLEN_ROUNDUP" macro to use it
   for short allocation sizes.

   Nicholas simply wanted to minimise the number of calls made to
   "sv_grow", without requiring any extra code or tests elsewhere in the
   interpreter. Gisle was unconvinced, reasoning that it takes memory
   away from "malloc" that "malloc" may be able to deploy more
   effectively elsewhere at some further point in time.

     Use a lookup table to save memory
     http://xrl.us/jqvw

*au revoir*, and LVALUE matches

   Dave Mitchell wrote to say that he was going off-line for a month
   (visiting India), without a computer, and thus the longest time with
   out access to one since 1979. Let's hope he reads the summaries when
   he gets back to catch up. Nicholas noted that he had to revert one of
   Dave's recent changes (#26410, which fixes infinite loops in the
   regexp engine on a tainted scalar) as it caused an unexpected failure
   to occur elsewhere. Dave still found time to analyse the problem
   carefully, and judged the behaviour to be ideally a new feature for
   5.10.

   Abigail didn't like the consequences that an unnecessary "/g" on a
   match could now be sufficient grounds for a program to die. All this
   reminded Rafael about two changes he applied a couple of years ago,
   noting the similarities between the problems raised then and now. Rick
   Delaney proposed a patch that fixed the test, but admitted to not
   understanding all the ramifications, having merely lifted code from
   elsewhere in the interpreter that deals with the same sort of issues.

   Dave Mitchell, no doubt in a Wifi bubble at the local airport, said
   that his patch was indeed wrong, and should be backed out from "blead"
   as well. And pointed to very old, deep magic as probably being the
   source of the problem, such as the hack that enabled "local $a[0] =
   $a[0]". The tests have now been marked TODO, so that someone can think
   about them again in time for 5.9.4.

     No fix is better than a bad fix
     http://xrl.us/jqvx

"bleadperl" regression testing

   Steve Peters has been a busy man, testing many, many modules against
   "blead" and gave a clean bill of health to nearly 4 dozen modules. 8
   passed with warnings and several big and/or scary ones failed ("TT2",
   "Kwiki", "DBI", "Devel::Hints" and "HTML::Mason". And if that wasn't
   enough, he also cooked up some patches and sent them off to the
   respective module authors.

   Gisle noted a problem with "Perl_newSVrv" as a result, which Rafael
   fixed up with change #26885.

     Test... everything
     http://xrl.us/jqvy

Asserting that non-"NULL" parameters are passed to "av_*"

   A while ago, in change #26513, Gisle added assertions to ensure that
   the "av_*()" functions are indeed given "av"s as arguments. Nicholas
   noted that "Template::Toolkit" fails the assertion, managing to pass a
   "NULL" to "av_fetch" at one point.

   Gisle wanted to know whether Nicholas wanted "NULL"s to be allowed
   again, pointing out that in an ideal world, "TT" should not have
   called "av_fetch" the way it did.

   Nicholas's point of view was that the assertion changes the API
   behaviour in a non-trivial (albeit better) way, and thus not really
   allowable for the maintenance branch, and said that it was Rafael's
   call as to whether he wanted it in "blead". Rafael decided to keep it.

     Theory meets reality
     http://xrl.us/jqvz

Compiling "blead" on VMS

   John E. Malmberg wrote in with a status report for "blead" on VMS,
   saying that 6 tests were failing, and gave a rundown on what was
   happening, or what he was going to do. Steve Peters and Craig Berry
   either pointed to or wrote a couple of changes that should have
   resolved the issues John was encountering.

   Marcus Holland-Moritz tried to reproduce the failures on a testdrive
   machine without luck, but did manage to isolate the changes that
   triggered the errors, and warned Nicholas that if he had integrated
   those changes into "maint" then the errors would pop up there as well.

     6 test failures
     http://xrl.us/jqv2

   After checking out a copy of "blead@26913" (meaning the source tree
   for perl as of change #26913), John found that only one test,
   lib/ExtUtils/t/Manifest, was failing. Craig Berry was at a loss as to
   how to deal with the failure. VMS has a much richer set of privileges
   than Unix. If the test is run from a process with high privileges, it
   succeeds. If run with lower privileges, it fails, as a result of what
   is, deep down, a rather sensible security decision in the design of
   VMS (that permissions do not necessarily follow a copied file). Craig
   pondered how to fix it. chromatic pragmatically suggested that a skip
   was in order. Craig amended the skip to nail down the semantics of the
   test more precisely.

     5 down, 1 to go
     http://xrl.us/jqv3

Devel-PPPort-3.07

   Steve Hay noted that the current version of "Devel::PPPort" is missing
   both "SvPV_nolen_const" and "SvPV_nomg_const" and wondered what the
   reason was. Marcus Holland-Moritz pleaded not guilty, having missed
   the information in the 1500 messages remaining to be read in his "p5p"
   folder.

   Marcus also provided the magic POD recipe required for documentation,
   which would have allowed the information to be extracted
   automatically, in which case he would have noticed them and included
   them in the release.

   Reflecting on what Marcus said, Jim Cromie noticed some discrepancies
   between embed.fnc and pad.c and wondered what the reason was. Marcus
   pointed out that that is what happens when people document macros or
   functions that are not strictly part of the public API. So more of a
   feature than a bug.

     Working according to spec
     http://xrl.us/jqv4

Reducing calls to "getprotoby{name,number}" by "IO::Socket::INET"

   Gisle found that the seemingly innocuous program

     use IO::Socket::INET;
     my $a = IO::Socket::INET->new("www.perl.org:80");
     my $b = IO::Socket::INET->new("www.perl.com:80");

   ... opened /etc/protocols on his linux system 4 times, which he
   thought was rather wasteful, and proposed a patch to cache the results
   and also work correctly on systems with borked /etc/protocols (which
   in itself is cause for a number of bug reports filed against LWP).
   Graham Barr (author and maintainer of IO::Socket::INET) liked the
   idea, and folded the change into his own repository for an upcoming
   release.

     IO, IO, it's off to less work we go
     http://xrl.us/jqv5

   Roland Illig asked why "perlcc" cannot compile a program he wrote in
   bug report #38279. Given Dave Mitchell's reply to a similar bug last
   week, it's safe to assume that "perlcc" is *never* going to compile
   that program.

     It doesn't work any more
     http://xrl.us/jqv6

     And it probably won't ever, either
     http://xrl.us/jqv7

"flock" does not work properly on (old) Solaris systems

   "Sign Writing" (what were his/her parents thinking?) filed bug #38282
   wherein we learnt that old Solaris versions have trouble "flock"ing.
   Abe Timmerman provided a snippet to help Sign research the issue.
   After investigating a bit more, Sign found that a similar program
   written in Python worked correctly.

   With a bit more help from Abe, Sign was able to solve the problem, who
   discovered "that perl drops the lock when duping the filehandle, but
   it appears to be related to duping it to something like STDOUT or
   STDERR. Perl tries to preserve these if the operation fails, but if
   it's explicitly closed before the dup, it works."

     flocking hell
     http://xrl.us/jqv8

Enabling cumulative profiling with "-Dusesitecustomize"

   Nicholas Clark was annoyed the way that "gcc"'s profiling mechanism
   consists of overwriting the contents of "$0.gmon" with the information
   gathered during the profiling run. This is exceptionally annoying when
   you are trying to generate cumulative data from multiple runs.

   After his first work-around attempt with a shell wrapper was foiled by
   too-clever code that acquired the necessary information directly from
   $^X, he devised a crafty solution involving "-Dusesitecustomize".

   After getting this to work, he benchmarked SpamAssassin's test suite
   and found that the most expensive routine was (*surprise!*)
   <S_regmatch>.

   Gisle Aas astutely observed that it would be more useful to benchmark
   SA doing real work, rather than the test suite, since, in theory, the
   suite is mainly testing fiddly edge cases.

     Now all we need is for someone to analys the results
     http://xrl.us/jqv9

Cross-compiling Perl

   John Clark wrote to relate his difficulties in cross-compiling perl.
   Specifically, going from "i686"/"gnu libc" to "i586"/"uClibc". Nothing
   too radical, like going from an IBM rs6000 to a PDP-11, but
   nevertheless John was surprising by the number of little niggly
   problems he encountered.e

   This prompted Philippe Ney to recall that he succeeded in
   cross-compiling for "i386-uClibc", but only with static linking, and
   was hoping that someone had managed to succeed in making dynamic
   linking work.

   No-one, apparently, had.

     Cross-eyed and painless
     http://xrl.us/jqwa

5.8.8 RC1

   The Release Candidate 1 for Perl 5.8.8 has been published by Nicholas.
   But then, you already knew that.

   H.Merijn Brand published his DOR (defined or) patch that syncs with
   the codebase as it currently stands.

   Reports of compile and test successes started to roll in.

     Take it for a spin
     http://xrl.us/jqwb

Allowing "chr(65535)" in regexps

   Marc Lehmann filed bug #38293, saying that using "chr(65535)" in a
   regular expression results in the warning:

     Malformed UTF-8 character (character 0xffff) in regexp compilation

   ... and yet "chr(65534)" works just fine. Both characters are
   guaranteed to be illegal characters that can be used for internal
   processing (sort of like an ultra-hyper-uber "\0" for end-of-string
   markers I suppose). Gisle made a good argument for why it would be
   handy for this to work in Perl.

   Sadahiro Tomoyuki pointed out that all you have to do is "no warnings
   'utf8';" to suppress the message. Tels traced down the error to a
   section of code in "Perl_uvuni_to_utf8_flags" that was doing a rather
   long-winded test, making Tels wonder whether the test was botching its
   conclusion.

   Marc, Tomoyuki and Yitzchak then started discussing Unicode arcana
   which started to make my eyes glaze over, and as this is the last item
   of the summary, you'll just have to click on the link to find out out
   more.

     The $65535 question
     http://xrl.us/jqwc

New Core Modules

   Podlators 2.0.1
       Russ Allbery reported that the problem concerning parser objects
       that cannot be reused has been resolved, along with a few other
       minor issues.

         http://xrl.us/jqwd
         http://search.cpan.org/dist/podlators/

   Archive-Tar-1.28
       Jos I. Boumans uploaded "Archive-Tar-1.28". Paul Marquess pointed
       out that the latest version of "Compress::Zlib" has some nice
       features that will make "Archive::Tar"'s life easier in the
       future.

         http://xrl.us/jqwe
         http://search.cpan.org/dist/Archive-Tar/

Perl5 Bug Summary

   1526 open tickets.

     http://xrl.us/jqwf
     http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html

In Brief

   Konrad Eisele noted that while it is not possible to tie a subroutine
   reference, he nevertheless proposed a patch for "Perl_mod()", which
   would at least make it produce a sensible error message.

     http://xrl.us/jqwg

   Seung-Ho Han asked where to find information on functions like
   "svref_2object" and "rv2sv", and was directed to look at perlguts and
   the "perldoc B" command.

     http://xrl.us/jqwh

   Steve Hay discovered that "maint"'s perlapi refers to 5.9.3, instead
   of 5.8.8 in relation to documentation on "Newx"/"Newxc"/"Newxz".

     http://xrl.us/jqwi

   Steve also noted that "New()" and its ilk have been replaced by the
   "Newx()" family, due to a redesign in how memory leaks are trapped,
   and wondered whether "NEWSV()" should be replaced by "newSV()"
   throughout the core (whilst retaining the "NEWSV()" definition for XS
   compatibility). Gisle agreed, and thus is was done, as change #26901.

     http://xrl.us/jqwj

   Dave Mitchell noticed that Copying contains version 1 of the GPL (the
   GNU General Public Licence that governs the use of Perl) but that
   pod/perlgpl.pod contains version 2. He thought that the same version
   should be used in both places, but didn't know whether version 1 or 2
   should be used. And that version 3 was just around the corner...

     http://xrl.us/jqwk

   Vadim Konovalov thought that the fact that statically linking of Perl
   extensions on Win32 was made functional was worthy of being mentioned
   in the release notes for the upcoming "maint" and "blead" releases.

     http://xrl.us/jqwm

   Nicholas Clark found that "SOFT_CAST" in perl.h appeared to date back
   from around 5.003 and wondered if these days it was just excess
   baggage. Andy Dougherty concurred, and so "SOFT_CAST" was cast off.

     http://xrl.us/jqwn

About this summary

   This summary was written by David Landgren. As they say, better late
   than never.

   Information concerning bugs referenced in this summary (as #nnnnn) may
   be viewed at http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=nnnnn

   Information concerning patches to maint or blead referenced in this
   summary (as #nnnnn) may be viewed at
   http://public.activestate.com/cgi-bin/perlbrowse?patch=nnnnn

   If you want a bookmarklet approach to viewing bugs and change reports,
   there are a couple of bookmarklets that you might find useful on my
   page of Perl stuff:

     http://www.landgren.net/perl/

   Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a
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   archive is at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Corrections
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-- 
"It's overkill of course, but you can never have too much overkill."

• This Week on perl5-porters (16-22 January 2006) by David Landgren