This Week on perl5-porters (28 April / 4 May 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (28 April / 4 May 2003)
  This week summary doesn't feature very exceptional bug fixes, or utterly
  important information, or pearls of the most pleasant sense of humor of
  the perl5-porters. Does this mean that it's completely non-interesting ?
  Read it and judge by yourself : shortcuts, ACLs, meta-information, and a
  couple of cows.

Windows shortcuts
  Last week, Edward Peschko started a discussion about adding support for
  Windows shortcuts (.lnk files) in the perl core. He asked whether the
  lib pragma could be modified to support the syntax

      use lib "shortcut.lnk";

  Several approaches were suggested : modifying readlink() on Windows, to
  handle shortcuts, or have a Windows-specific module that redefines
  CORE::readlink(). Several people noted that a shortcut is not the same
  thing at all than a symlink, and thus that perl should not cheat about
  readlink() and paths involving symlinks.

      http://xrl.us/hi6

ACL support, and the filetest pragma
  Stas Bekman remarks that some OSes use ACL (Access Control List) -based
  file access controls. He asks whether perl could use internally the
  equivalent of

      POSIX::access($file, &POSIX::X_OK)

  instead of "-x $file", where access(2) is supported.

  Mark Mielke points out that the filetest operators are not (in the
  general case) equivalent to the access(2) mechanism, due to a possible
  difference between the effective user id and the real user id. And
  backward compatibility should be preserved. Jarkko Hietaniemi recalls
  that the "filetest" pragma should be used modify to the semantics of
  filetests.

      http://xrl.us/hi7

  Later, Slaven Rezic asks whether "filetest" works at all. This pragma is
  supposed to be lexically-scoped, like "strict". It is not, because it
  tests the compiler hints at run-time, but they are only relevant at
  compile time. This was fixed by Jarkko and Slaven.

Cows
  Aaron Sherman asked about copy-on-write : how it's supported, and
  whether it's going to become the default. (Reminder : perl can be
  compiled with the "-DPERL_COPY_ON_WRITE" cc flag, which enables copying
  string values only when they're changed.) He's looking for ways to
  improve the performance of SpamAssassin, a tool that processes lots of
  strings if any, and apparently tries to implement a module to provide
  COW-enabled magic scalars. Nicholas Clark summarized the state of the
  copy-on-write feature : "the good news: I can't measure any slowdown.
  The bad news: I can't measure any speedup."

      http://xrl.us/hi8

Meta-information in CPAN packages
  Autrijus Tang posted a detailed proposal about the inclusion of a
  standard META.yml file in CPAN distributions, and the inclusion therein
  of some meta-information that could be used by the CPAN indexer, to
  prevent some files or directories from being indexed. Ken Williams noted
  that Module::Build was already able to generate a META.yml file.
  Autrijus' proposal was extensively discussed in a long thread :

      http://xrl.us/hi9

$VERSION
  John Peacock is apparently about to post a patch that makes the $VERSION
  variable magical, so that it automagically turns version-like scalars
  assigned to it into version objects.

  Matthew O. Persico asks about the possibility to backport John's changes
  via a CPAN module.

      http://xrl.us/hja

In brief
  Casey West continued to send doc patches and to close doc bugs. And
  indeed, due to general effort, a lot of bugs were closed. By the way,
  Robert Spier is organizing the PerlBugAthon, aimed at closing as many
  perlbugs as possible, during OSCON 2003's Hackathon.

      http://www.perl.org/oscon/2003/perlbugathon/

  Gurusamy Sarathy warns that there are probably cases of
  non-thread-safety in perl 5.8.0, because some global variables have gone
  into perlvars.h, instead of being put into intrpvars.h. Sorting them out
  is needed.

      http://xrl.us/hjb

  Rafael Garcia-Suarez provided a patch to get bleadperl working on SCO
  OpenUNIX 8.

  Tye McQueen proposed a simple patch to fix a bug in hash bucket
  assignment (the number of buckets not growing in some pathological
  cases).

  Richard Clamp posted a quick-fix patch to get perl 5.005_03 to compile
  on newer Linux distributions.

      http://xrl.us/hjc (long)

  Brent Dax asked why regex-heredocs aren't allowed (something like
  "$string =~ < and via a mailing
  list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org.
  Feedback (and patches) welcome.

0 rgarciasuarez 5/5/2003 8:42:54 PM