Hey everyone,

Following is the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list summary for the past week. Enjoy!

July 27th-31st

News and updates

Now that CVE-2016-1238 has been addressed in patches for 5.24.1 and 5.22.3, Todd Rinaldo has renewed the discussion around removing the current directory (.) from @INC entirely in core.

Leon Timmermans intends (The great pl2bat unification) to reunite three forks of the same code for writing Batch scripts that run Perl scripts.

Grant reports

Tony Cook provided (TONYC TPF Grant 7 report 15) several (TONYC TPF Grant 7 report 16) grant (TONYC TPF Grant 7 report 17) reports (TONYC TPF Grant - June 2016). I recommend reading them as they provide interesting details on the work Tony has done in core recently.

Issues

New issues

• Perl #128740: perl5 segfaults (perl5 versions gentoo(5.20.0, 5.22.0), guix (5.22.1)) without message.
• Perl #128743: Here-doc missing terminator message is not null-clean.
• Perl #128747: base/lex test 41 failure under make minitest in some platforms.
• Perl #128753: Bug #128747 for perl5: base/lex test 41 failure under make minitest in some platforms.
• Perl #128763: NV_PAYLOAD_SIZEOF_ASSERT fails on PPC darwin.
• Perl #128765: Custom warnings categories are disabled by any preceding no warnings 'category'.
• Perl #128769: Bleadperl v5.25.3-22-g8901dde breaks FLORA/Class-C3-XS-0.13.tar.gz.
• Perl #128774: Signal handlers aren't honoured at END time.
• Perl #128786: making $^V a version object broke functionality.

Resolved issues

• Perl #124115: [PATCH] Present utf8 and bytes pragmas consistently in perlport.
• Perl #128574: Some tests call fresh_perl* incorrectly.
• Perl #128685: Repeated installs broken in blead.
• Perl #128701: Unicode handling of warnings appears broken in 5.18.2 and 5.24.0.
• Perl #128734: tr/// with named Unicode chars broken since 5.23.3.
• Perl #128747: base/lex test 41 failure under make minitest in some platforms.
• Perl #128753: Bug #128747 for perl5: base/lex test 41 failure under make minitest in some platforms.
• Perl #128763: NV_PAYLOAD_SIZEOF_ASSERT fails on PPC darwin.

Rejected issues

• Perl #75506: perldb "m" has problems with PPI::Document objects.
• Perl #128767: File::Path::make_path dies under error conditions.

The issue (Testing Config::General consumes extreme amounts of memory) raised by A. Sinan Unur has been found by Sinan to be a problem with Config::General instead.

Suggested patches

Karen Etheridge provided a patch in Perl #128775 to update Parse::CPAN::Meta to ignore PERL_YAML_BACKEND and PERL_JSON_BACKEND while building core itself, where other backends are not installed yet. This patch will be merged and added to 5.24.1.

Lukas Mai provided a patch in Perl #128782 (perlport hard to read with platform names following function description) to update perlport to make it more readable.

Father Chrysostomos provided a patch to Perl #128740: perl5 segfaults (perl5 versions gentoo(5.20.0, 5.22.0), guix (5.22.1)) without message.

Discussion

Matt Trout (mst) suggested to add a patch to remove . from @INC which will first be set to false, then turned on by testers to try and find issues, and then fully turned on once issues are resolved. He notes specifically that some portions of the toolchain is the main concern of breakage.

Karl Williamson asked (Use of global vs interpreter variables) on the issue of global variables in the interpreter. Should we minimize them or add a few to cut down on memory consumption and generation?

Father Chrysostomos added more information on Perl #128708 (recommended my sub example in perlsub leaks memory) and the problem with lexical subroutines and memory leaks.

H. Merijn Brand (Tux) mentioned (versiononly commit) that a commit to update Configure but requires amending the file Porting/Glossary.

Ricardo Signes updated (perl5.24.0 RC deletion) that he will delete five old RCs for 5.24.0.

Relating to Perl #128774 (Signal handlers aren't honoured at END time), Zefram explained the reason for the change and that the unhooking of signals should probably happen either before global destruction upon process closing or right after. Leon Timmermans favors before.

Father Chrysostomos added (Two maint blockers) two tickets to include as blockers for 5.24.1. The first merged, the second will be merged as well.

Jarkko Hietaniemi worked on adding support for clang's -Weverything, but mentions it does not fully work on blead yet. Andy Lester stepped up.

Dave Mitchell is continuing (Re: merging optimising sub signature work so far) his progress on the subroutine signature optimization work.

There are additional comments (RE: ASCII support in z/OS) on the suggested change for perl on z/OS.

Aristotle Pagaltzis provided comments on Karl Williamson's RFC on syntax for allowing script run pattern matching.