Hey everyone,

A bit late but... following is the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list summary for last week. Enjoy!

August 1st-7th

News and updates

Dave Mitchell merged the signature optimizations branch he was working on. Exciting!

Todd Rinaldo suggested (Smoke-It branch?) introducing smoking of perl core branches against CPAN to test how specific features affect CPAN and might cause breakage. More about that further down under Discussion.

A new version of Encode (2.84) is out.

Dave Mitchell merged his cleanups of the a flag in embed.fnc .

Chris 'BinGOs' Williams reminded p5p about documenting commits in the perldelta file for the upcoming 5.25.4 release this month.

Neil Bowers released a new version of NEXT with some doc fixes and asked to sync blead with it.

Grant reports

Dave Mitchell provided his grant (DAVEM TPF grant#2 report #137,#138,#139) reports (DAVEM TPF Grant#2 July 2016 report).

Issues

New issues

Perl #128836: XSLoader meta information incorrect.

Perl #128843: printf %a mishandles subnormals.

mishandles subnormals. Perl #128864: perlre(1) and paired double quote regex searches.

James E. Keenan reported test failures on FreeBSD.

Resolved issues

Rejected issues

Perl #123649: POSIX ::localeconv : behavior change when called without POSIX ::setlocale .

Suggested patches

Bulk88 provided a patch in Perl #128837 to fix a test with VC 2005 on Windows XP.

Chris Travers provided a patch to perlsec in Perl #128845: patch attached for perlsec.pod. regarding loading code from the current working directory, which is not advised.

Karen Etheridge provided a patch to Perl #128836 (XSLoader meta information incorrect) which was merged.

Discussion

Under Perl #126310 (no "Malformed UTF-8 character" warning on single-quoted strings under use utf8 ), Karl Williamson and Father Chrysostomos discuss where in the code to solve the issue.

Karl Williamson mentioned (Re: ASCII support in z/OS) that there might be a way to support ASCII in z/OS without breakage to those not using ASCII-based z/OS instances.

Father Chrysostomos asked (Alignment question) about alignment of the parser struct. There are additional comments from Leon Timmermans, Eric Wong, and Tony Cook, providing details on the issue.

Todd Rinaldo intends ([perl #127810] Provide -Dfortify_inc Configure option to remove .from @INC) to submit a rebased patch. Craig A. Berry recommended picking a name which is more descriptive and not absolute, so people will not assume a wider range of issues were addressed by this change.

As mentioned above, Todd suggested a way to smoke perl branches against CPAN to detect breakage. Andreas Koenig provided his recipe for doing this, which he uses to help test breakages of CPAN for specific features.

Dave Mitchell confirmed that Coro 6.511 builds successfully on Linux with ithreaded DEBUGGING perl 5.22.3-RC2.

James E. Keenan updated about test failures in blead, which Karl Williamson confirms is on Linux and found the offending commit. Father Chrysostomos provides a fix.

Father Chrysostomos asked about an optimization he had done and wonders if he's interpreting the output of cachegrind correctly and whether the change is valuable.

Karl Williamson suggested (RFC: perldeprecated.pod) adding a pod to list deprecated features, and possibly those that are discouraged, including the time they fell under this category and when it is scheduled to be removed.

Yaroslav Kuzmin provided (Re: ASCII support in z/OS) a response regarding ASCII support in z/OS. Yaroslav also summarized the different options available.

Dave Mitchell provided (Re: Interpreting cachegrind output) explanations on how to measure performance differences in perl.

Michael Schroeder asked about a different way to handle a recent change in base.pm.