March 15th-27th

News and updates

Perl 5.23.9 is now out!

All tickets blocking 5.25.1 are now collected in Perl #127731.

Ricardo Signes and the team are reviewing all the 5.24 blockers here and here.

Steve Hay is organizing the voting file for 5.22.2.

Tony Cook providing his grant reports. In total about 38 hours and approximately 18 tickets were reviews or worked on, and 3 patches applied.

Dave Mitchell providing his grant report.

Term::ANSIColor 4.05 is now out.

podlators 4.07 is now out.

version.pm was upgraded in core to 0.9914.

Encode 2.83 is now out.

Matthew Horsfall is adding more macros from handy.h to Devel::PPPort so they are available in earlier versions of Perl.

Issues

New issues

• Perl #127743: Storable loses information on large strings.
• Perl #127739: ExtUtils::ParseXS breaks compilation of XS modules on 5.8.5 with -Duseithreads -Doptimize='-g' -DDEBUGGING on GCC 5.3.1.
• Perl #127742: Hash keys are limited to 2 GB.
• Perl #127727: Bleadperl breaks RPerl.
• Perl #127759: die inside sort comparitor causes SV error.
• Perl #127760: File::Path fails tests in non-threaded builds on smoke testing.
• Perl #127746: charset.t fails on Solaris.
• Perl #127788: scalar %hash shows/uses HvTOTALKEYS and not HvUSEDKEYS.
• Perl #127790: Segfault involving Data::Dumper, anonymous sub, and scalar ref.
• Perl #127780: Document that backticks and qx return octets, not characters.
• Perl #127794: Strange behavior when forking in BEGIN.

Resolved issues

• Perl #127705: Segfault / strange match with recursive subpattern.
• Perl #127231: Bleadperl breaks App::JobLog.
• Perl #57512: Implicit close()s are silently unchecked for error.
• Perl #127690: Add contributing/VCS repository to Carp.
• Perl #125303: Bleadperl breaks IPC::Run.
• Perl #127543: dtrace/-DDEBUGGING builds now fail on Solaris.
• Perl #127455: Regexp fails to compile on Solaris x64 debugging optimized builds.
• Perl #127764: Perl with -Dusebacktrace doesn't compile on Darwin.
• Perl #124430: Bleadperl breaks App::assh.
• Perl #126484: Bleadperl breaks Lexical::SealRequireHints.
• Perl #126545: Bleadperl breaks perl5i.
• Perl #127713: Bleadperl breaks Unicode::Unihan.
• Perl #127316: lib/File/Copy.t fails when running in non-root.
• Perl #125887: Warning: PERL_UNUSED_DECL redefined.
• Perl #125972: Segfault on bareword as loop index.
• Perl #127783: perlport POD "portable filename characters" chart missing "s".
• Perl #127183: Non-canonical hexadecimal floats are parsed prematurely.
• Perl #127751: Error building ODBM_File.
• Perl #127773: Assertion failure in perl build with -Dusebacktrace.
• Perl #127553: autouse misbehaves if target module is already loaded.

Proposed patches

Bulk88 provides a patch in Perl #127791 to silence warnings in inline.h on Win64 VC build. It was merged.

Discussion

In a conversation around Perl #127712, it was suggested that a future version of Perl might incorporate a fix for the vivification problem, perhaps using a perl-version feature bundle. The problem is that is that autovivification doesn't always respect lvalue vs. rvalue.

The discussion revolving a new type of word boundary continues. One suggested, raised by Abigail, is to provide a class of new boundaries - word boundaries being only one of them. Continue to read the thread here.

Karl Williamson is looking for help from anyone in updating perlhacktips.

There seems to be a solution to the problem of using dlltool to create DLLs on Win32, described in Perl #78395.

Achim Gratz described a problem he's been chasing with a library that misbehaves on Cywgin, due to how ld searches for libraries vs. the search algorithm of Configure.

Dave Mitchell resolved require statements with barewords with leading colons.

Laurent Dami provides another opinion regarding the change Steve Hay is making, putting Winsock errors into $^E.

Dave Mitchell, Aristotle Pagaltzis, and Karl Williamson worked on improving the perldiag message for implicit close warning.

Yves Orton asks why we keep some generated files in .gitignore but some we do not. Zefram offers the explanation.

Dave Mitchell suggested adding optional types to subroutine signatures. Zefram would like the options to stay open for something broader and the conversation contains a few ideas on what can be done in the future in subroutine signatures.

Karl Williamson raises the issue of Perl's fundamental flaw in the interaction of perl and ithreads. He asks what to do about locales and threads in the upcoming perl 5.24.

Rafael Garcia-Suarez discusses the deprecation of encoding.pm and finding a new home for one of its functions: get_locale_encoding.