This Week on perl5-porters (22-28 March 2004)
Elizabeth Mattijsen
Weekly Review. After enjoying free pastry way too much at the 100 year
anniversary of the local bakery, this summary should be a light meal to
prepare.
More info on undefined warnings
Dave Mitchell reported that he was working on a patch that would refine the
warning for using undefined values, by adding variable name, and even better,
which hash key or array index contained the undef value. His worry was that
it might be a security hole. Reference was made to the recent changes in
Apache log handling (where newlines are now escaped). The consensus seemed
to be that it was ok to show as much as possible, as long as the output was
sanitized, and possibly should be UTF-8 aware.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=74bb3a81236c4928
What version are you?
Stas Bekman asked for a way to find out whether a module is available in a
specific version _without_ actually loading it. Rafael suggested
ExtUtils::MM_Unix->parse_version, Merijn came up with "V", which oddly enough,
does _not_ live on CPAN. Anyways, the original question turned into several
issues related to taint and whether or not it is save to execute a part of a
file which you would otherwise require.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=7aed3c0739a668a
http://search.cpan.org/~mschwern/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/
http://www.test-smoke.org/perl/noncpan.shtml
UNIVERSAL::VERSION broken?
Stas was busy this week. A bug report about UNIVERSAL::VERSION being broken
in 5.9.x opened the can of worms yet again that is consistent version checking
in different versions of Perl. What generated this, was a bug report to the
mod_perl 2 list which stated version 3.40 of CGI had been used. This caused
Stas to lose some hair. John Peacock explained why this may have been
confusing, but still technically correct. And in the end, there was a patch
that will hopefully wind up on CPAN soon.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=f15911eb2e696379
http://search.cpan.org/~jpeacock/version/
Enhancing Hash::Util
Yves Orton sollicited comments about additional features for Hash::Util,
specifically related to locked hashes. Some nice new features were suggested
and of course, one should have a look at Yves' Data::Dump::Streamer module.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=c9e0ec38159844a
http://search.cpan.org/~yves/Data-Dump-Streamer/
Perl 5.8.4-RC1-tobesomedaybutnotjustnow
Nicholas Clark released a 5.8.4 snapshot for all of you to test. The code
freeze for 5.8.4 is at March 31, 23:59:59 GMT, which is _one_ second before
April 1st. But I'm sure Nick means business when he says nothing will go in
after that. Quickly scanning through the changelog, reveals that 5.8.4 will
have stacked filetest operators, fixes to Storable, Math::BigInt, a speedup
for Unicode case mapping and many, many other fixes and documentation updates.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=556d9f7d2566cf9e
http://opensource.fotango.com/perl/perl-22588.tar.bz2
In brief:
Some spam seeped through to the list this week. Thanks again to all of
the good folks who manage to keep the barrage of virus infested mail from the
list the rest of the time!
Many bug reports were made, and some of them were quickly resolved or at
least acknowledged. But as Robert Spier mentioned two weeks ago, the number
of open tickets is still increasing. So if you feel so inclined, please have
a look at the open tickets and help the perl5 porters by aiding in resolving
the open issues at hand.
About this summary
This summary was written by Elizabeth Mattijsen, from Echt, The Netherlands
while Rafael is getting settled in Paris. Weekly summaries are published on
http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which subscription address
is perl5-summa...@perl.org. Comments and corrections are welcome.
Paul Johnson
> Quickly scanning through the changelog, reveals that 5.8.4
> will have stacked filetest operators
I don't think that is right - though Nick did take the upgraded tests
from thet patch.
--
Paul Johnson - pa...@pjcj.net
http://www.pjcj.net
Elizabeth Mattijsen
>On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 01:20:20AM +0200, Elizabeth Mattijsen wrote:
> > Quickly scanning through the changelog, reveals that 5.8.4
> > will have stacked filetest operators
>I don't think that is right - though Nick did take the upgraded tests
>from thet patch.
I guess you're right: I should have scanned a little more closely: it says:
[ 22580] By: nicholas on 2004/03/24 15:36:43
Log: Integrate:
[ 22294]
Implement stacked filetest operators (-f -w -x $file).
(just the filetest.t refactoring)
Will correct in the next summary.
Liz
Nicholas Clark
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 01:20:20AM +0200, Elizabeth Mattijsen wrote:
>
> > Quickly scanning through the changelog, reveals that 5.8.4
> > will have stacked filetest operators
>
> I don't think that is right - though Nick did take the upgraded tests
> from thet patch.
IIRC I also took the B::Concise changes from that patch. But not at the same
time.
Blurrgh. As I think everyone discovered, don't organise conferences over the
weekend where the clocks go forward. Apart from the new "timezone" every day
for the past 4 days, the Nordic Perl Workshop was good fun.
Now, as for the weekend where the clocks go back....
Nicholas Clark