September 2026 Archives

This week in PSC (237) | 2026-09-28

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]

This week in PSC (236) | 2026-09-22

All three of us met.

  • Talked about the two “match case” proposals. The two seem to cover different intents, so it’s not clear that either just replaces the other. The destructuring concept is nice in principle but needs further discussion. We will let discussions continue on the mailing list for now.
  • The PrePPC about @INC dirs seems good enough to progress to a full PPC document for further discussion of details; in particular specifics about non-UNIX operating systems.
  • We want to find a more coherent concept for “hooking core functionality” and possibly the %{^HOOKS} hash in particular, before considering such possibilities as a replacable random number generator. E.g. do $SIG{__WARN__} and $SIG{__DIE__} belong in here?
  • Specifically on providing a hook for generating random data, it feels like the rand() (and srand()) function interface provided by Perl is itself a limitation for getting good behaviour. This might need looking into before simply replacing a better source of randomness.

[P5P posting of this summary]

This week in PSC (235) | 2026-09-14

The first meeting of the newly-elected group.

We did some initial handover tasks (github groups, mailing lists)

We intend to do some point releases for 5.44 and 5.42 to include some security fixes and build issue bugfixes. We will take suggestions on what other fixes to be included.

We began discussing ideas on what it would look like to support the idea of local::lib and similar techniques better by perl core itself, handling perl version upgrades and so on.

We discussed improving the dual-life module release process to make it easier and prevent mistakes.

[P5P posting of this summary]

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