This is Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the traffic on the core perl maintainer’s email list. Perl 5.16.1 was officially released last week and announced to the list. Did you install it yet?
This week’s topics are:
- perl 5.16.1 is now available
- UTF8 and Data::Dumper
- Reopening filehandles can clobber PerlIO layers
- indirect object heuristic misparses foo bar->baz
- CALL FOR DOCS: how to dual life?
- what’s blocking 5.14.3?
- Dear hackers – a small request
- Re: backporting stuff
perl 5.16.1 is now available
Ricardo Signes announced that perl 5.16.1 was available on a CPAN mirror near you. Congratulations to Rik and the entire P5P team. perl 5.16.2 is expected in November 2012.
Read the announcement
Download perl 5.16.1 tarball
UTF8 and Data::Dumper
Steffen Mueller reported a UTF8 patch in Data::Dumper that appeared to be in the wrong #ifdef block. The patch was to prevent perl from reading beyond a byte boundary in some UTF8 data buffers. Karl Williamson created a new patch to resolve the problem.
Reopening filehandles can clobber PerlIO layers
David Golden opened a ticket about how duplicating filehandles in Capture::Tiny caused PerlIO layer flags to disappear. After some further investigation by Leon Timmermans, it turns out that this problem has been in Perl since 2001 and relates to the way perl handles reopening filehandles. Let’s just say if the source code comment (doio.c:597) starts with:
/* Eeek - FIXME !!!
Maybe things aren’t so great in the code that follows.
indirect object heuristic misparses foo bar->baz
Indirect object notation, that is…
my $instance = new Class;
is evil. See this Stack Overflow question for positive proof. In any case, Lukas Mai opened a ticket showing how the heuristic was too aggressive. Conversation ensued.
CALL FOR DOCS: how to dual life?
Ricardo Signes posted:
I would *adore* it if someone who has done it before would write up the process
of dual-lifing core code.
We have a number of things that should either be dual-lifed or should be
organized as dists if possible (like Tie::Scalar or Time::local).
what’s blocking 5.14.3?
As Rik turns attention toward a 5.14 maintenance release, he asked what issues are holding up a 5.14.3 release.
Dear hackers – a small request
Matt Trout encouraged readers to send love notes to our Fearless Leader, Ricardo Signes because of an off list email that irritated Rik. Later, Rik wrote that he had mishandled his reaction to the email but that he appreciated the love. He encouraged readers to send love to other people too, because it makes people’s day.
Re: backporting stuff
Later in the same thread above, Rik posted a longish cri de coeur about some of the problems he sees with backporting stuff from blead. The TL;DR version is that he specifically calls out the cherrymaint process and some of the issues around creating a meta RT ticket for maintenance releases. It’s a long email, but read the whole thing.