A few small matters turned up this week.
There are a few issues sitting around that we’d like to roll into a 5.44.1 release, being various bugfixes that have accumulated. We’d like to get a more streamlined process for making these releases. We hope to have a more concrete proposal soon.
The recent PR (#25042) to fix the SV flags associated with PL_sv_zero looks like a good idea that we should accept anyway, even though it doesn’t actually fix the JSON serialisation problem with JSON::XS. That module may be beyond our ability to influence.
We think that renaming util.h to something less likely to collide with OS headers (such as perl_util.h) is a good idea as a first step. This may likely lead to a wider task of moving all of our internal headers into their own subdirectory, to neaten up the structure and avoid the problem recurring in future, but this first step will at least help reveal any potential problems with doing that.
[P5P posting of this summary]
All three of us discussed the recent issue GH24977 about how the behaviour of interpolation in regexp quotes changes under use strict in latest blead perl. We feel this is a change that needs more thinking and adjustment before it reaches a stable perl release.
Aside from that, the mailing list and github issues tracker have both been rather quiet of late, so there aren’t any other major issues that require our attention.
[P5P posting of this summary]
This week we invited Stig to discuss some general policy matters around security announcements and related development work.
We also talked about improvements to the way we handle maintenance releases and backporting bugfixes (in general, not just security-related ones) with the aim to make the process smoother and hope to do it a little more often.
[P5P posting of this summary]
The three of us discussed:
- There is overall agreement that
@INC handling should be improved, but there are still outstanding questions and issues that overlap with build modules, installer tools, and so on. Plan is to publish a partial document so far as a draft PR and get others to comment further.
- The recent change to improve the accuracy of
caller reported line numbers in expressions involving anonymous subroutines (Pull #24396) has caused more BBC fallout than might have been expected. So far it doesn’t need any immediate response from PSC but we continue to keep an eye on it.
[P5P posting of this summary]
All three of us (plus Graham’s cat) met as usual.
- Discussions about some case-matching syntax ideas continue on the mailing list. PSC is following along but for now there does not seem to be a need to come to an official response.
- From this it sounds like finding a better solution to controlling Perl’s autovivification (especially in deep hash accesses) is a useful goal and can be pursued independently. Potentially addressed by optional chaining (PPC0021).
- Adding a
builtin::rand_bytes function as per PR24722 sounds worthwhile. There are portability concerns that still need to be addressed on the subject of platform-dependent entropy sources (such as on VMS).
[P5P posting of this summary]
