rockyb

Recent Actions

• Commented on Rewriting B:Deparse and Reintroducing B::DeparseTree
  Thanks for the information! This is useful. Some things I've notced.... First I don't see this documented in either t/README or pod/perlhack.pod, so how is someone to know about such good work? (I suspect the number of people reading this...
• Posted Rewriting B:Deparse and Reintroducing B::DeparseTree to rockyb

  I will be giving a talk on B::DeparseTree and its use in a debugger Devel::Trepan at the upcoming

• Commented on Improved Syntax Highlighting in the Debugger
  Some comments and questions. Why did you decide on Syntax::Highlight::Engine::Kate::Perl instead of Syntax::Highlight::Perl::Improved ? Having done the same thing myself in Devel::Trepan, I am curious at the merits and disadvantages of each approach. Although Devel::Trepan can be slow, the slowness...
• Posted Exact Perl location with B::DeparseTree (and Devel::Callsite) to rockyb

  Recently I have been working on this cool idea: using B::Deparse to help me figure out exactly where a program is stopped. This can be used in a backtrace such as when a program crashes from Carp::Confess or in a debugger like Devel::Trepan.

  To motivate the idea …

• Commented on A Basic Challenge
  I don't know how others feel, but both of these while having some coolness isn't as direct or cool as how you do this with C++. Doing something not as good, albeit a long time ago isn't the same thing,...
• Posted A Basic Challenge to rockyb

  Recently, I came across this project which turns C++ into BASIC. How close can Perl do?

  I recall reading somewhere that Perl has the ability to vastly alter its syntax. Is Perl going to be bested by C++?

• Posted Introspection in Devel::Trepan to rockyb

  Here are some introspection routines in Devel::Trepan. I’m not aware that these exist in other debuggers, nor as Devel::REPL plugins. But if I’m wrong feel free to correct me in…

• Posted RFC: Term::ReadKey Availability and requiring it in Term::ReadLine::Perl5 to rockyb

  A while back I forked Term::ReadLine::Perl making Term::ReadLine::Perl5 because of the former maintainer's lack of responsiveness regrading my patch to add GNU Readline history and general lack of responsiveness overall.

  Term::Re…

• Commented on My Love/Hate Relationship with CPAN Testers
  > I'd like to see if separated out into (1) tester, and (2) configuration Absolutely! They are separate things. Let's say I did something dumb and one of my smokers sent out bad reports. Immediately 10 people give me -1...
• Commented on My Love/Hate Relationship with CPAN Testers
  > If I get a bug on some weird environment setup I want to know about it so I can fix it. Me too. But it would also help me reproduce the problem if I am alerted that this bug...
• Commented on My Love/Hate Relationship with CPAN Testers
  And testers just have one "reputation" Why is this a problem?...
• Commented on My Love/Hate Relationship with CPAN Testers
  Never said I didn't want public scrutiny. My point was that a service that is putting out reports publicly has some obligation to ensure that its reports are correct. And not to do so is hypocrisy. Right now, there is...
• Commented on My Love/Hate Relationship with CPAN Testers
  Ok. Then maybe the reports shouldn't be available publicly, but rather only privately to the module authors. :-) And search.cpan.org and metacpan.org should remove their links too....
• Posted My Love/Hate Relationship with CPAN Testers to rockyb

  The Great Part

  I really like the idea of a CPAN testing service where individuals volunteer their computers to tests CPAN packages and those results are accumulated and shared.

  The accumulated results then are tallied with other result. People can use this information to help me …

• Commented on SelfLoader and things I've learned writing/using a debugger
  You may have responded before I edited the blog post, so I am sorry for not being more clear initially. The other form of the expression is: if $0 == __FILE__ and given that compilation occurs just before running without...
• Commented on SelfLoader and things I've learned writing/using a debugger
  I confess that I had previously been thinking about this perhaps too restrictively by expecting that the code for the subroutine not exist if that branch of the if statement isn't taken. Aspects of the blog were about how a...
• Commented on SelfLoader and things I've learned writing/using a debugger
  While this is good and I applaud such a change it shows another unflattering aspect with Perl that is alluded to in this blog entry and in one of my replies about not discussing the INIT, UNIT, sections: Perl is...
• Commented on SelfLoader and things I've learned writing/using a debugger
  Ok, thanks. I have corrected the blog entry. That Perl has all of these slight variations (and I didn't even get into the other phases that Perl has like INIT, CHECK, or UNITCHECK) I don't necessarily think is a good...
• Posted SelfLoader and things I've learned writing/using a debugger to rockyb
• Commented on A plan for revamping and replacing the Perl debugger.
  Thanks for the correction. perl5db.pl in Perl 5.16.1 has only 9,493 lines; so 10K lines is a little a slight overstatement. But the point I was trying to make (and 10K bytes doesn't do it) still holds: that this is...
• Commented on A plan for revamping and replacing the Perl debugger.
  Let's work together on this. When I browsed the github repository there seems to be a layer of dealing with sockets and parsing text output that should its own separate Module. In fact it would be the same thing you'd...
• Commented on A plan for revamping and replacing the Perl debugger.
  First, let me say that if you are happy with the existing debugger, inspection, or just using print statements or whatnot, great! But as for why others want to improve perl5db, see for example this perl foundation project which was...
• Posted A plan for revamping and replacing the Perl debugger. to rockyb

  There is a little bit of overlap here with the first blog on Devel::Trepan. I apologize for that, but I don’t see how this can be avoided. The focus here though is more on the existing Perl debugger rather than Devel::Trepan which is given as one concrete example from which to draw…

• Posted Devel::Trepan 0.31 release to rockyb

  A new release of Devel::Trepan is out there.

  A number of changes were the result of problems found in writing the various debugger blogs and in preparing for a little local ="http://w…

• Posted Location, Location, Location to rockyb

  By way of explanation...

  In preparing this and my previous blogs, I have noticed aspects where Devel::Trepan could be improved. For this blog, I discovered when comparing Devel::Trepan output with that from a recent

• Posted To gdb or not to gdb? to rockyb

  Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

  Spoiler alert: the answer is 1 or true

  Before delving back in the next planned blog post of another important nuts-and…

• Posted Devel::Trepan Debugger evaluation of Perl statements to rockyb

  In the last blog, I started describing features that are new in Devel::Trepan that aren't in perl5db.…

• Posted Devel::Trepan Debugger command aliases and command completion to rockyb

  In my first blog I described why I wrote a new debugger for Perl and how the rewrite helps me add cool features more easily. Here I'll start to describe the cool features of this debugger. To…

• Posted On writing a new Perl Debugger (Part 1 - Why?) to rockyb

  This is the first part of what will be several parts. The next part may be more interesting to a general audience: what are some of the cool new features of the debugger? …

Comment Threads

• vsespb commented on My Love/Hate Relationship with CPAN Testers

  > I love CPAN testers unreservedly, and am puzzled by the OP's apparent belief that he, or at least his failing modules, are stigmatized by test failures.

  I did not see OP example, but here are real false positives:
  http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers.discuss/2013/06/msg3162.html
  http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers.discuss/2013/07/msg3163.html
  ="…

• David Cantrell commented on My Love/Hate Relationship with CPAN Testers

  Let me address one of your points in detail, before I get to the over-arching point:

  Or maybe in the summary for this package the line listing 5.19.0 should note that this release was more unstable than the others?

  This is already done, by saying that it's perl 5.$odd_number. These are dev releases of perl. Most (all?) tools for looking at test results can distinguish between release versions and dev versions of perl, including the CPAN-testers website and CPANdeps. Testing on dev releases of perl is useful, because it's a great way of both finding bugs in perl,…

• Mithaldu commented on My Love/Hate Relationship with CPAN Testers

  Rocky, you complain about false negatives and that you cannot remove them from the database. However i find myself hopelessly confused that you ignore the ability to cut a new release, or make your module detect a tester and just give back any kind of result you want. I've as a tester personally had to deal with modules that went "Oh, this is windows, my module works, but i don't know how to test on windows, so i'll issue myself a PASS here no matter what."

  If you say that you're the one with not enough power here, then you're not being nearly creative enough.

• Joel Berger commented on A Basic Challenge

  I thought you might say that, and IMO, that's more preprocessor than C++ anyway. What would be cool would be implementing a DSL or even a p6 grammar that does it directly.

• rollbear commented on A Basic Challenge

  Hullo all,

  I don't generally write in Perl, so in many ways I don't belong here. But I was made aware of this challenge, and since I'm the one guilty of the C++ stuff, I thought I'd introduce myself. Hi there!

  Are you sure you want to show that Perl can be an even weirder language than C++ is?

  I understand the spirit. I did this in part because I was amazingly bored, and in part because an ex-colleague complained about having inherited code that reminded him of BASIC. The combination of the two made horns grow on my forehead, and they weren't the BSD type.

  Wel…