Hey everyone,

Following is the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list summary for the past week, including the first Monday of this week. Enjoy!

I want to take a moment to thank Bulk88 for his help with these summaries.

November 30th - December 7th

Updates

The release of Perl 5.22.1 was postponed to handle and review a few hexfp bugs which were discovered on release of RC3. Steve Hay's post has the voting file link.

Term::ANSIColor 4.04 is released! More information is available in the announcement.

podlators (consisting of Pod::Man and Pod::Text) 4.00 released!

Soon thereafter, versions 4.01, 4.02, and 4.03 were released as well.

The Mac OS 10.9 compiler has compilation problems on ithreads builds since Jarkko Hietaniemi introduced a commit that adds clang thread safety analysis annotations to the perl source code. With the help of Aaron Crane, it was decided to only support this when using a later version of clang.

Bugs

Reported bugs

• Perl #126794: $Config{installsitescript} not populated on Windows.
• Perl #126812: Feature request for Data::Dumper to support condensed ranges.
• Perl #126813: Feature request for Data::Dumper to support tailing commas in list output.
• Perl #126814: Feature request for Data::Dumper to support tighter packing options.
• Perl #126815: Segfault discovered by fuzzing. Possibly a dup of Perl #125540.
• Perl #126837: Segfault in a custom perl -d:KP after loading Time::HiRes.

Resolved bugs

• Perl #121048, Perl #125341, and Perl #125789: Illegal sub declaration crashes.
• Perl #123991: Null pointer dereference.
• Perl #126245: perlapi SvLEN_set documentation confusingly similar to SvCUR_set.
• Perl #126260: Division by zero error.
• Perl #126437: hex documentation not clear on invalid input.
• Perl #126608: lookahead or look-ahead? The former!
• Perl #126735: Perl debugging disconnecting problem.
• Perl #126753: Move Win32 $^X code to where the $^X code for other OSes live.
• Proposed patch to make -O in Configure the default.

Proposed patches

Bulk88 proposed a revised patch in Perl #126686 (build-time parallelness).

Tony Cook provided a proposed patch for handling unnecessary rebuilds, described in Perl #126710.

Sullivan Beck provided a patch to update Locale::Codes.

Doug Bell provided a patch in Perl #126821 to mention the use of $? in backticks documentation. This patch had already been merged.

Achim Gratz provided a patch in Perl #126834 to fix a Cygwin-related test.

Discussion

Yves Orton suggests setting SVf_POK, SVf_IOK, and SVf_NOK flags only when on setting and not on conversion. This will allow differentiating between what a type is (in a manner of speaking) and how you can use it. The suggestion and the responses are an interesting read that detail some of the difficulties in types in dynamic languages.

Dave Mitchell raised a discussion the semantics of @_ with signature subroutines.

Hanno Böck noted a possibly unnecessary wrapper script generated by Makefile.SH, but as Andy Dougherty explains, it is not as simple as it looks.

Dave Mitchell helped debug Perl #126261 and Karl Williamson provides more details and is working on a fix.

Ed Avis is looking at standardizing more documentation and words with different spellings and pronounciations. Now looking at regex vs. regexp, Ed asks which should be used. Opinions differ, as usual.

Karl Williamson is noting that Porting/bench.pl does not include utf8_heavy.pl in its results.

Karl also inquired about utf8 support in identifier names.