develooper Front page | perl.perl5.porters | Postings from December 2011

NWCLARK TPF grant report #13

From:
Nicholas Clark
Date:
December 6, 2011 13:35
Subject:
NWCLARK TPF grant report #13
Message ID:
20111206213535.GK37285@plum.flirble.org
[Hours]		[Activity]
2011/11/28	Monday
 0.25		RT #104504
 2.00		reading/responding to list mail
 0.25		roffitall
=====
 2.50

2011/11/29	Tuesday
 1.00		debugger tests
 1.75		global destruction backref panic (diagnosis)
 0.75		process, scalability, mentoring
 1.25		reading/responding to list mail
 1.25		use v5.16;
=====
 6.00

2011/11/30	Wednesday
 2.25		global destruction backref panic (analysis)
 5.00		global destruction backref panic (diagnosis)
 0.50		process, scalability, mentoring
=====
 7.75

2011/12/01	Thursday
 1.00		global destruction backref panic (analysis)
 2.25		process, scalability, mentoring
 2.75		reading/responding to list mail
=====
 6.00

2011/12/02	Friday
 1.25		process, scalability, mentoring
 2.00		reading/responding to list mail
=====
 3.25

2011/12/03	Saturday
 0.25		checking and merging smoke-me branches
 0.50		process, scalability, mentoring
 0.25		t/re/regexp.t cleanup
=====
 1.00

Which I calculate is 26.50 hours

The largest and most "exciting" part of the week was spent single stepping
in gdb to determine the cause of a global destruction "panic" related to
weak references, that Karl Williamson accidentally stumbled upon whilst
innocently refactoring completely unrelated code. After taking the better
part of a day to locate and understand the cause, I mailed the explanation
to the list, along with some thoughts on what the right fixes are. Several
people have provided useful feedback, but I'm hoping that Dave will have
time soon to ponder it, as the bug is in the assumptions of changes he made
about 8 years ago

Nicholas Clark



nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About