Hey everyone,

I apologize for skipping last week. Following is the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list summary for the past two weeks. Enjoy!

February 15th-29th

Corrections

The previous summary mentioned Perl #125833 as a problem with leading semicolons. That was a typo. It's leading colons. Thank you, Tony Cook, for the correction!

News and updates

Perl 5.23.8 is now available! You can read the release announcement here.

Tony Cook provided another grant report filled with interesting details about his work. Around 18.5 hours spent in which approximately 14 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 5 patches were applied.

Additional following grants reports of Tony available here and here. They show in total about 40 hours of work, during which approximately 21 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 5 patches were applied.

Dave Mitchell provides his grant reports. In total, over 14 hours of work, focusing mainly on an issue with Solaris failing to link when using a combination of -Dusedtrace and -Duseshrplib.

Issues

New issues

• Perl #127543: dtrace/-DDEBUGGING builds now fail on Solaris.
• Perl #127552: No warning or error on @$.
• Perl #127553: autouse test misbehaves.
• Perl #127555: Attempt to free unreferenced scalar.
• Perl #127559: Populating localized %SIG breaks aliasing stack.
• Perl #127568: Excessive memory usage with Unicode regexp. Possible duplicate of Perl #127392.
• Perl #127581: 5.23.8 + "Assuming NOT a POSIX" causes spurious warning in PPIx::Regexp::Token::Literal.
• Perl #127582: Warning for [.posix.] classes too eager.
• Perl #127585: IO-Compress test hangs on MS Windows.
• Perl #127599: Assertion failure with code 0,qr{(}.
• Perl #127603: Bleadperl breaks Scalar-List-Utils. Duplicate of Perl #112312.
• Perl #127611: Building perl 5.22.1 64bit on Solaris 10 with GCC 4 has failing test.
• Perl #127617: /n regexp modifier and backreferences to previous groups.
• Perl #127619: Broken memcpy() fallback to bcopy().
• Perl #127624: Wrong Digest::SHA version in 5.18.4?
• Perl #127632: Regex compilation leaks memory when warnings are made FATAL.

Resolved issues

• Perl #98662: Enhance HARNESS_TIMER functionality.
• Perl #118955: Vulnerability in Module::Metadata. (CVE-2013-1437)
• Perl #120976: 5.18.3 blockers.
• Perl #121002: Error accessing remote file on OpenVMS using Perl 5.8.6.
• Perl #121277: Commit "Make perlbug Unicode-aware" broke perlbug on Win32.
• Perl #121421: Segfault in 5.18.2 with Digest::SHA.
• Perl #121456: perl5db.pl does not set new filehandles into ReadLine after pager command.
• Perl #121963: 5.20.0-RC1 Can't compile on Android.
• Perl #122761: split /\A/ works like /^/m, matches embedded newlines.
• Perl #124113: Compile-time warning with UTF8 variable in array index.
• Perl #125880: Build with -Dcc=c++ on FreeBSD builds a static perl.
• Perl #125892: qr/(?[ ]) regression with !.
• Perl #126886: S_skip_to_be_ignored_text: Assertion failure.
• Perl #127386: Clarify setting $? by Perl.
• Perl #127514: Minor documentation improvements in hv.h and scope.h.
• Perl #127518: Clarification for the return type of pos in doc.
• Perl #127532: Fix Win32 gmake with Win64 VC with 32bit GCC in PATH build failure.
• Perl #127537: /\W/ regression in 5.20 with UTF-8 and a synthetic start class.
• Perl #127556: Win32 builds with dmake/gmake don't install libperl523.a or libperl523.lib.
• Perl #127561: Remove an unused variable.
• Perl #127584: Perl 5.23.8 sets $Config{archname} incorrectly on MS Win.
• Perl #127588: Silence warning in Win32CORE.
• Perl #127620: Static functions in Time::HiRes.
• Perl #127627: Typo in perlport.

Proposed patches

John Peacock submitted a patch to update version.pm with the version which was released to CPAN.

Bulk88 provided a patch to try and fix Perl #125296.

Bulk88 also provided a patch in Perl #127588 to silence a warning in Win32CORE.

Following another ticket relating to memory consumption in regexps (Perl #127568, which was consolidated with Perl #127392), Karl Williamson provided a set of patches to reduce the memory consumption for non-ASCII regexps. The patches seem promising from Atoomic and Todd Rinaldo's reports.

Bulk88 provided a patch in Perl #127636 to "teach" makedef.pl an alternative macro to PERL_COPY_ON_WRITE.

On a related topic, Bulk88 provided a patch in Perl #127635 trying to fix s///r with -DPERL_NO_COW attempting to modify the source SV. Tony Cook made suggested alterations.

Vadim Konovalov submitted a patch to modernize strict.pm. It was discussed heavily, including problems it introduces.

Discussion

Dave Mitchell makes another attempt to work out the semantics of @_ for a subroutine with signatures. I recommend reading it and providing input!

Ed Avis suggests making perl either warn or error when using or defining variables with special names, such as @$, since they are most likely a typo. Abigail provided interesting input on the effects of this.

Steve Hay raised an old topic relating Winsock errors. He proposed to put Winsock error codes into $^E after each Winsock function call, export the WSAE-related error constants from Errno.pm and POSIX.pm for checking these error codes against, instead of $!, on Windows from 4.24.0 onward.

On the topic of 5.24 blockers, the context stack revamp has also broken Algorithm::Permute but it is yet unclear if this is worth fixing. More importantly, however, is that Devel::NYTProf is also broken. Dave Mitchell was able to mitigate one problem but more involved work is required to get it to fully pass.

Jarkko Hietaniemi provides an update for Perl #122482 (introducing netlib dtoa.c library to convert between decimal and binary).

The conversation around stringifying a double (relating to Perl #122482) continues.

Dave Mitchell has been looking into various warnings that come up during the blead build run. These come from several .pm files not containing any POD documentation.

Bulk88 provides more information on Perl #125296.