Hey everyone,

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

May 19th-24th

News and updates

Perl 5.25.1 is now available! You can read the release announcement here. The date for 5.26 is for May 2017. Those are typos. :)

Lexical subroutines are no longer experimental!

Perl can now recognize version control conflict markers, thanks to a patch by Lukas Mai in Perl #127993.

Karl Williamson created a META ticket for 5.24.1 blockers in Perl #128222.

Dave Mitchell provides his grant report. In total, over 21 hours, mostly spent on making Scope::Upper work on latest versions of Perl 5.24.0.

Issues

New issues

• Perl #128167: Issues with the embedded y2038 library.
• Perl #128182: Segfault in Perl_sv_escape with assert failure.
• Perl #128183: Assert fail in op.c without other symptoms.
• Perl #128189: Assert fail in sv.c with no further symptoms.
• Perl #128196: Incorporate suggestion splitting XS files into ExtUtils::MakeMaker::FAQ.
• Perl #128199: Clarification of VMS-only function in File::Copy documentation.
• Perl #128200: Documentation shouldn't recommend usenet.
• Perl #128207: Assert fail in vutil.c with very large version numbers in warnings in quadmath builds.
• Perl #128209: Failed XSLoader::load() leaks memory.
• Perl #128213: No deprecation warning on literal left curly bracket in /.{/.
• Perl #128215: Regexp weirdness?
• Perl #128225: Substitution within (?{}) causes segmentation fault.
• Perl #128227: Should we switch (again) to vfork for spawning external processes?
• Perl #128226: Remove the requirement for null termination on PVs.
• Perl #128232: Quantification breaks regexp anchors.

Resolved issues

• Perl #69686: Fix DragonFly thread lib selection.
• Perl #123367: Does my sub f; eval 'sub f{}' make sense?
• Perl #128169: Remove internal test modules from Module::CoreList.
• Perl #128178: Indirect object syntax fix in FileHandle.pm.
• Perl #128187: Make list assignment to sub :lvalue{keys} an error.
• Perl #128195: Upgrade to Thread::Queue 3.11.
• Perl #128197: Upgrade to threads 2.09.
• Perl #128204: Segfault in Perl_grok_number_flags under use feature 'bitwise'.
• Perl #128219: Typo in perlrecharclass.

Proposed patches

Klaus Baldermann provided a patch for perlbug in Perl #128180 to add more verbosity to the output, following a PerlMonks thread.

Michael Haubenwallner provided a patch to avoid libperl.dll.dll.a in Cygwin.

Discussion

An update from H.Merijn Brand (Tux) that he had finished preparing builds for 5.24.0 for HP-UX ia64.

The discussion around detecting perl6 in the shebang line continues.

Ed Avis suggested to revisit a suggestion by Kent Fredric to bring in indirect into core. People have shown support for removing indirect object notation from examples in the core documentation, but have yet to expressed a position about Kent's original suggestion. Sawyer X requested that performance would be verified first, as well as a discussion continues before making a decision on it.

Father Chrysostomos pings us about the sub :const feature, allowing to make anonymous subroutines constants. Is anyone using it? Do you like it? Does it have any problems? Should it stay experimental?

Father Chrysostomos suggests perhaps only partially deprecating encoding.

There is an interesting conversation around Perl #127531 (permit \escape on right side of my). Father Chrysostomos made progress on the topic, and several interesting comments on the topic by Ricardo Signes and Aristotle Pagaltzis.

H.Merijn Brand updates that a machine which was used for smoking perl core on HP-UX 10.20 had gone for good. Rest in piece.

Father Chrysostomos suggests deprecating encoding::warnings.

Glenn Golden asks whether the usage of FileHandle.pm is applicable in an example of perlipc.

In Perl #128227, Eric Wong suggests moving Perl to vfork for spawning external processes. Leon Timmermans found that originally Perl had used it but abandoned it, while Ivan Pozdeev adds that Configure asks whether to use vfork and that the current POSIX standard (intended to replace vfork) is posix_spawn.

Tom Wyant noted in Perl #128213 that while literal left curly bracket was deprecated in 5.22 and produces a compile error since 5.25.1, there was no deprecation warning on 5.24. Karl Williamson provides extensive comments on the change and its intent. This continued with a lively discussion between Zefram and Yves Orton.