This Week on perl5-porters - 11-17 May 2008

This Week on perl5-porters - 11-17 May 2008

   Dominic Dunlop: Trouble is, some of it is CGI, and people whinge
   loudly when previously-clean CGI starts warning.

   Ed Avis: Ha ha ha. I think any possible programmer mistake can be
   found in a Perl CGI program somewhere.

Topics of Interest

5.8.9-to-be on Irix

   David Cantrell took the time to track down the failures (regarding
   "Sys::Syslog") with the upcoming 5.8.9 release. Versions 0.13 (bundled
   with 5.8.8) through 0.18 both pass on 5.8.8 and 5.8.9-tobe on Irix.
   0.19 and beyond fail on both versions. But 0.24 (the current version)
   does pass on platforms other than Irix.

   David provided an additional clue, in that the compiler moaned that
   something was wrong with a variable named "RETVAL" (a name that will
   strike fear into any author starting out in XS).

   Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni, the current maintainer, wailed in despair,
   since 0.18-0.19 was a monster release, introducing support for the
   Win32 platform. After a couple of hours of serious work (and some
   minor goofing off), he offered a Subversion version for David to try.
   David announced that it worked, although the compiler was still a
   little suspicious of "RETVAL". Sébastien fixed that as well.

   And Sébastien will buy David a beer at the next London Perl Workshop.

     you know this will go down on your permanent record
     http://xrl.us/bkysu

File::Path::mkpath() incompatibility in perl-5.10

   Gisle Aas ran into grief over old-style/new-style interface for
   "File::Path". As a result, David Landgren learnt that sometimes it
   doesn't pay to be too Clever when trying to introduce new features
   while maintaining pure backwards compatibility at the same time.

   Thus, the next release of File::Path will guarantee total backwards
   compatability, and those wishing to live on the cutting edge will have
   to say so, one way or another.

     http://xrl.us/bkysw

On the almost impossibility to write correct XS modules

   Hmm. Lot of traffic next week on this one (sometimes it comes in handy
   to run late).

     http://xrl.us/bkysy

"eval "require Foo"" with binary-incompatible XS modules

   Niko Tyni was running into problems setting up Debian packages in
   order to upgrade from 5.8.8 to 5.10.0. The main reason being that
   Debian don't use a $Config{vendorarch}, which was designed to resolve
   the problem of keeping binary-incompatible XS code apart.

   There were a number of suggestions as to what could be done to fix up
   the situation, but Nicholas Clark was hesitant to endorse any of them,
   pointing out quite rightly that Debian had already survived the
   5.6-to-5.8 upgrade.

     http://xrl.us/bkys2

Method call overloading

   Following on from last week's musings, Ricardo Signes released a first
   cut at testing method call overloading to allow one's own dispatching
   techniques.

     TIMTOWTdispatchI
     http://xrl.us/bkys4

   After pondering the issue for a couple of hours, he released a second
   version with a new, improved class-based scheme. Unfortunately, in
   Ricardo's eyes, the syntax sucks. With a bit of encouragement from the
   parser, it might be possible to come up with something beautiful.

     classy work
     http://xrl.us/bkys6

Division by zero folding deferred to run-time

   Eric Brine wondered what the reasoning was behind deferring constant
   folding (such as 1/0) until run-time, when it could be caught at
   compilation time (as, in fact, it used to in 5.8).

   Nicholas Clark explained that the concept as such was an optimisation,
   and as such it should not affect the behaviour of a program. For
   instance:

     print 1/0 if $ARGV[0] > 10;

   ... could not be compiled at all on 5.8, even though in some
   circumstances the code may never be executed in the first place.

   The point in question is that such a construct might be hidden behind
   two constants subs that have different values depending on the
   platform the code is running on. In that case, the code might be
   uncompilable even though the program itself could run perfectly well.

     early decisions bad, late decisions good
     http://xrl.us/bkys8

Compiling perl (5.10.x) with gcc <= 3.2.3

   After sparring with the RT bug database, Bram began to install as many
   versions of "gcc" as he could lay his hands on, to see how they fared
   compiling perl.

   When he got as far back as version 3.2.3, the "Configure" and "make"
   succeeded, but the test suite spat out numerous "libgcc_s.so.1: cannot
   open shared object file" errors.

   Andy Dougherty suggested a riff on the "-fstack-protector" problems
   seen elsewhere this week, but that didn't do any better. Since the
   compiler in question was released five years ago, Andy suggested just
   adding a note in the INSTALL file.

   H.Merijn Brand committed change #33841 to note the fact in
   README.linux, but wasn't really happy with the idea, since gcc runs on
   other platforms as well. But that's ok, because he will have to revert
   the change, since Bram figured out a simple recipe that allows 3.2.3
   to work.

     http://xrl.us/bkyta

Empty pattern and /o

   Bram lifted an old bug out of obscurity, concerning the empty pattern
   ("//") and the "/o" modifier, the point in question being the
   interactions observed when "use re 'eval'" comes into play.

   Yves Orton grumbled that all these things were complicated to begin
   with, so one can grasp the potential for mischief when they interact
   in a single expression.

   Abigail thought it would be nice to downplay the importance of "/o" in
   the documentation, since it invariably led people to find out about
   it, and then proceed to use it incorrectly.

   Similarly, Abigail thought that "//" (match again with the same
   pattern that was used previously) doesn't have any use in the real
   world; most canonical examples being somewhat contrived. What does
   happen with annoying regularity is that people use "/$var/", and $var
   turns out to be empty, thus triggering an unexpected action at a
   distance.

   Yves Orton wanted to make "/o" a true no-op, and make the magic empty
   pattern behaviour only kick in if the pattern was well and truly a
   "//" as parsed. And it probably comes as no surprise that Yves had a
   couple of perfectly reasonable use cases where "//" patterns are very
   useful:

     if (m/$some_big_nasty_pattern/ and $1 eq $something) {
       s///;
     }

   and

     if (m/$pat1/ or m/$pat2/ or m/$pat3/) {
       s///;
     }

   Yves was careful to point out that he only used empty pattern magic
   with the substitution operator. For the match operator, he thought the
   empty pattern should warn all the time.

   And "/o" can't be no-op'ed just yet, since it still adds a tiny
   smidgen of performance, even in 5.10. So first of all Yves needs to
   fix the underlying problems that make it useful in the first place, at
   which point it could be deprecated.

     http://xrl.us/bkytc

TODO of the week

Remove duplication of test setup

   Schwern notes that there's duplication of code - lots and lots of
   tests have some variation on the big block of $Is_Foo checks. We can
   safely put this into a file, change it to build an %Is hash and
   require it. Maybe just put it into test.pl. Throw in the handy
   tainting subroutines.

Patches of Interest

Add Some Links to External (WWW) Resources to the Perldocs

   Shlomi Fish responded to the criticism of his patch (it should not be
   accepted since it has a higher maintenance burden due to linkrot),
   arguing that a quality product requires maintenance, and a high
   quality product requires more maintenance.

   Quoting Nicholas Clark:

   There is a fundamental conflict in the Perl documentation as is.
   People are tugging it in both ways - it's trying both to be a
   reference manual (terse, to the point), and an introduction/tutorial.

   It can't be both. It certainly can't be all things to all people.
   [...]

   We have to assume some level of intelligence on the part of the
   readership. If they don't know a concept, they will be smart enough to
   research it for themselves.

     rejected
     http://xrl.us/bkyte

Compress/Raw/Zlib/Zlib.xs // comment fix

   Andy Dougherty replaced some C++ comments with good old-fashioned C
   comments. Paul Marquess thanked him and updated his own repository.
   H.Merijn Brand applied the change, and idly wondered whether it will
   be possible with git to reject a patch that contains such base sins.

     /* TIOOWTDI */
     http://xrl.us/bkytg

"h2ph": recognise the quote mark delimiter on #include directives

   Niko Tyni saw that "h2ph" had trouble when system headers include file
   names in quotes rather than angle brackets. He wrote some code to fix
   up the problem and this allowed a number of regexp experts to show off
   their skills. In the process, the patch was thoroughly reviewed and
   made it in.

     #include "peer-review.h"
     http://xrl.us/bkyti

New and old bugs from RT

uc/lc/ucfirst/lcfirst fail on typeglobs (#39019)

   Bram tried to sneak this one past as being resolved, since it
   certainly looked like it. Nicholas Clark disagreed, explaining that
   there was a problem with it, although likely one that only he could
   fix.

   So Bram asked Nicholas to explain more clearly what the problem was,
   or rather, given what input produces incorrect output?

     an open question
     http://xrl.us/bkytk

"bleadperl -Dm -e1" segfaults on win32 (#39806)

   Bram asked for Win32 porters (which these days is Strawberry, right?),
   and/or Linux+threads porters to see if this problem persists.

     call me in the morning
     http://xrl.us/bkytn

glob() should do taint checking (#39821)

   Bram asked for a resolution on this issue. Andy Dougherty replied that
   functions don't fail on tainted args unless they have an impact on the
   outside world. "glob" pulls information in from the outside world, so
   we don't care about what we ask of it. On the other hand, what "glob"
   returns is viewed with the utmost suspicion.

     live free or die
     http://xrl.us/bkytp

Bug in "File::Find" on Windows when targetdir is bare drive letter and 
"no_chdir = 1" (#41555)

   Bram implemented David Landgren's suggestion (or something resembling
   it) to create a regression test for the code to deal with a directory
   search starting with a volume name and a relative directory (that is,
   something like "D:right\here".

   Rafael thought the patch looked sane enough to apply; the smokers will
   soon find out if it causes severe burns.

     http://xrl.us/bkytr

"NDBM_File" fails to build (#50180)

   Andy Dougherty created a pair of patches to teach "NDBM_File" how to
   build itself, and he believed that the patches were safe to apply to
   all perl versions. H.Merijn Brand applied the patch to blead.

     http://xrl.us/bkytt

Deparse interpolation in regex literal (#51848)

   Ambrus Zsbán had filed a report about "B::Deparse" failing to
   restitute "/${x}y/" correctly. Rafael Garcia-Suarez commented this
   week, saying that it failed because the optree was missing an
   "op_concat", and this threw everything else off. Rafael proposed a
   first fix, with ugly cutting and pasting, but then sat down like a
   good boy and did a proper refactoring and wrote some regression tests
   as well (change #33851).

   This did lead him to wonder, all the same, *why* the opcode was no
   longer there. Yves Orton blamed Dave Mitchell. Dave replied saying
   that yes, it was his fault. The change was a result of some initial
   work some time ago to make "(??{...})" work better. The idea is to had
   the regexp compiler a list of tokens that comprise the code block,
   instead of a single blob of uselessness.

     http://xrl.us/bkytv

op/pwent.t should use the DirectoryService on OS X (#53500)

   Tom Wyant read about this problem in the perl5-porters summary, and
   was inspired enough to write a patch to fix the issue. Yay him! Rafael
   applied the patch to blead, hoping that no Leopards, Tigers or other
   such beasts would be hurt in the process.

     w00t
     http://xrl.us/bkytx

"elseif" should be "elsif" (#53808)

   Ben Aveling got mixed up between Perl and Ruby or PHP or ASP or TCL or
   not Javascript and wrote "elseif" instead of "elsif". Instead of
   receiving a boring syntax error, Ben was slightly puzzled by the fact
   that he received an explicit recommendation to change "elseif" to
   "elsif". His reasoning was that if the lexer is so smart to
   second-guess the programmer, why not just emit the elsif token and be
   done with it.

   Abigail pointed out that doing this would break any code that defined
   a sub named "elseif" (although it could be argued that any programmer
   doing so should be taken out the back and beaten severely about the
   head with a blunt object). David Nicol gave "Macrame" a plug, showing
   how one could write a macro for this situation. Yitzchak
   Scott-Thoennes pointed out that a language change of this nature would
   break syntax-highlighters.

     we'll leave it at that
     http://xrl.us/bkytz

Bug in "Time::HiRes" 5.11 (#53962)

   Dmitry Karasik thought he found a bug in "Time::HiRes" on 5.10 and
   blead (bug #53962) and thought the underlying code looked pretty
   horrible. Dominic Dunlop replied that many different systems handle
   high resolution time measurements in many weird and wonderful ways.

   Given this extra bit of information, Dmitry was able to refine his
   patch. But the patch didn't solve Reini Urban's ongoing "Time::HiRes"
   failures on Cygwin.

     adapt to reality
     http://xrl.us/bkyt3

"pod2man" nroff =head2 with two C<> blocks (#53974)

   Kevin Ryde looked at a POD heading with two C directives and noticed
   that the bold was switched off after the first one. He was brave
   enough to delve into Pod/Man.pm and produce a patch that fixed things
   up.

   Unfortunately he wasn't entirely certain that this wouldn't cause
   problems elsewhere, and the copious tests available did not help
   clarify the issue.

     http://xrl.us/bkyt5

Respawning processes with negative return values on Win32. (#54028)

   Alistair showed how a very short C++ program whose main claim to fame
   was to return -1 as a status code to the operating system could be
   called twice, even though the Perl code contains only a single
   "system" call. He delved into the code in win32.c and found some
   suspicious code that appears to interact with $!.

     skeletons in the closet
     http://xrl.us/bkyt7

Misparsing of sort comparison subroutine intention (#54040)

   Ken Williams tripped up over the difference between the use of a
   function used to compare pairs in a sort and sorting the results of
   what a function returns. David Nicol was hard pressed to classify the
   problem as a bug from either a documentation or implementation
   standpoint.

   Aristotle Pagaltzis admitted to having been bitten by the bug before,
   Abigail suggested using the secret "+" operator to disambiguate the
   meaning. David finished with a revised wording for the documentation,
   and there the thread ended.

     care is required when sorting the list returned from a function
     http://xrl.us/bkyt9

"usethread=no" Configure compiler test file try.c is missing. (#54042)

   Reini Urban saw that deactivating threads with MAD triggered an
   internal Configure script bug, and so he reported it. Alas, no porter
   with sufficient Configure-fu responded.

     please report this
     http://xrl.us/bkyub

"perl -wle '%::=();//'" crash (#54044)

   Reini also recorded the fact that resetting the main stash and then
   running an empty match will cause perl to dump core. He wasn't sure
   which way out was the best, but thought that he could do better than
   just segfaulting.

   Yves Orton recalled reading about someone who built up some Markov
   chains using real Perl code to produce slightly bogus code to try and
   trigger segfaults. Nicholas Clark pointed Yves to the perl5-porters
   post, a mere five minutes later.

     match my stash
     http://xrl.us/bkyud

semi-panic: attempt to dup freed string (#54114)

   Nicholas Clark suspects this bug is yet another case of the stack not
   being reference counted.

     wontfix
     http://xrl.us/bkyuf

Need more "-fstack-protector" (#54120)

   Andy Dougherty sent in a patch to fix up undefined symbols from
   occurring when "-fstack-protector" is used. The correction was to use
   compiler flags to ensure the use of the switch was propagated out to
   XS modules.

   Nicholas Clark pointed out a flaw in the plan that forced Andy back to
   the drawing board.

     http://xrl.us/bkyuh

"IO::Seekable" + "POSIX" == constant subroutines redefined (#54186)

   Niko Tyni showed how the incestuous relation between (what in fact
   actually turned out to be) "Fcntl" and "POSIX" would generate lots of
   messy warnings.

   Nicholas Clark fixed things up so that "POSIX" now imports what it
   needs from "Fcntl" instead of reinventing wheels badly. In the process
   of cleaning things up, he realised that there was scope for doing the
   same kind of decrufting elsewhere in the codebase, which should worth
   another TODO.

     http://xrl.us/bkyuj

"readlink()" returns result along with garbage (#54198)

   Denis Melnikov noticed that using "readlink" in the Linux /proc
   filesystem can lead to some strange results. After some investigation
   it was decided that the observed behaviour was quite appropriate.

     although not really documented
     http://xrl.us/bkyum

segfault in "perl_clone()", probably due to running out of memory (#54224)

   This week, Niko Tyni also uncovered another way to generate a
   segfault, but admitted that it wasn't a very important issue.

     but a core dump is a core dump
     http://xrl.us/bkyuo

Panic opt close in regex "/(?:(o){2})?/" (#54228)

   Niko also rediscovered the bug involving a capture group and a curly
   specifier in a regexp. Apart from the fact that no-one can provide a
   definition of what such an expression should do, it certainly
   shouldn't dump core.

   David Landgren grovelled through his memory and old summaries and
   identified bug #39233 as an earlier instance of the same underlying
   problem. Yves Orton assigned himself the bug so as not to forget about
   it.

     http://xrl.us/bkyuq

Perl5 Bug Summary

   Bram's been busy again this week.

     279 + 1383 = 1662 (+8 -44)
     http://xrl.us/bkyus
     http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html

New Core Modules

   "threads::shared" 1.21
       Jerry D. Hedden shares some more threads goodness.

         http://xrl.us/bkyuu

   "Thread::Queue" 2.08
       and this allowed him to push a new release of this one, too.

         http://xrl.us/bkyuw

   "IO::Compress::*" 2.011
       Following on from the C++ comment, Paul Marquess release 2.011,
       which also fixed a slew of problems reported on RT.

         http://xrl.us/bkyuy

In Brief

   (My damned wireless network at home kept flaking out this week,
   causing my ssh sessions to die. At some point during an evening's
   summarising, I noticed that the file was truncated right about here.
   I've restored the rest of it from a backup, but some items I wrote
   between then and now were wiped out. Sorry about that. Since what goes
   here is usually short, and resolved, it's not so bad).

   Rafael Garcia-Suarez took chromatic's patch to add ..., !!!, and ???
   operators and applied it.

     I want a blah blah blah operator
     http://xrl.us/bkyu2

   Reini Urban pleaded for the change that fixes the crash when
   localizing a symtab entry (bug #52740) to be backported to 5.10.x.

     one for Dave
     http://xrl.us/bkyu4

   Yves Orton announced that he was out of action but back in the saddle
   again a bit. Marvellous. Now he'll go and add a slew of regexp verbs,
   and I still haven't digested the first lot.

     onya!
     http://xrl.us/bkyu6

   Bram says bleadperl crash in "Perl_pp_entersub()" (#40493) is fixed.

     http://xrl.us/bkyu8

   Bram looked at a perl -d bug on Mandriva Cooker with 5.8.8 (bug
   #39758) and said it looked pretty good (although the jury was still
   out on 5.8.9-tobe)

     so, the smoke finished?
     http://xrl.us/bkyva

   He also delivered some promised TODO tests to record the fact that
   "print Does::Not::Exist, ''" does, when it shouldn't (bug #53806).

     http://xrl.us/bkyvc

   He also repackaged another suggestion from a previous week concerning
   the AIX Hints file (libm package).

     awaiting comments
     http://xrl.us/bkyve

   Bram wrote a documentation patch to clarify the use of reverse in
   scalar context. Yves applied it. Which allowed Bram to close bug
   #39187.

     http://xrl.us/bkyvg

   Edward Peschko wanted to know if a particular debugger that promised
   seamless XS debugging ever made it out into the wild.

     http://xrl.us/bkyvi

   Matt Kraai made some edits in the FAQ to link "perlfunc" to the
   correct section of "perlop".

     q//, qq//, qx//, and qw//
     http://xrl.us/bkyvk

Last week's summary

   Hmm, seems it never made it to the list. It did turn up on
   summary-only mailing list if you need to hunt down a copy. And yes,
   the archive on dev.perl.org is not being updated. I'll get to that...
   eventually.

About this summary

   This summary was written by David Landgren.

   Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a
   mailing list, (subscription: perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org). The
   archive is at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Corrections
   and comments are welcome.

   If you found this summary useful, please consider contributing to the
   Perl Foundation or attending a YAPC to help support the development of
   Perl.

-- 
stubborn tiny lights vs. clustering darkness forever ok?

• This Week on perl5-porters - 11-17 May 2008 by David Landgren
• Re: This Week on perl5-porters - 11-17 May 2008 by H.Merijn Brand
• Re: This Week on perl5-porters - 11-17 May 2008 by Bram