Hey everyone,

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

August 15th-21st

News and highlights

Perl 5.25.4 is now available!

There's a suggestion to dual-life Hash::Util. This would allow moving a function there and deprecating it in the Internals:: namespace.

Dave Mitchell suggested to improving the output of high hints bits displayed in B::Concise. That has been done following the suggestion.

Dave Mitchell also found a specific check in the internal av_fetch function which slows down all array fetches and doesn't even cover more than one particular way in which a problem could be triggered. Dave suggested removing it, which makes sense. This had also been done following the suggestion.

Ricardo Signes pinged the topic of being able to write state(@a) in Perl #114932.

A surge of new tickets provided by Brian Carpenter who is diligently fuzzing perl. Brian also wrote a blog post about it.

Grant reports

Tony Cook TPF Grant 7 report 18.

Tony Cook TPF Grant 7 report 19.

Tony Cook TPF Grant 7 report 20.

Tony Cook TPF Grant July 2016.

Dave Mitchell TPF Grant 2 report 136.

Issues

New issues

Resolved issues

Rejected issues

Perl #94654: push doesn't work on blessed references.

Perl #128950: Possible bug in perl \u string processing.

string processing. Perl #129009: [Win32] UV_MAX is wrong on use 64bit int builds.

Suggested patches

Bulk88 provides an alternative patch in Perl #128930 (automatically detect GCC vs VC and set VC ver number on Win32) which was merged.

James E. Keenan provided a new patch for Perl #128856: DirHandle: Improve test coverage and provide descriptions., based on Tony Cook's feedback.

Karen Etheridge provided a patch in Perl #128987: to upgrade CPAN::Meta to 2.150010.

To address HP-UX problems, H. Merijn Brand (Tux) suggested (Getting HP-UX smokes green again) a patch.

Discussion

Jarkko Hietaniemi continues running Coverty on the codebase and found another group of errors relating to utf8 which are a bit odd. Aristotle Pagaltzis provided the background for the mentioned code.

If you're interested in how the lexing and parsing code of perl, Dave Mitchell provided an analysis of Perl #128951 (heap-buffer-overflow in Perl_sv_vcatpvfn_flags ). Father Chrysostomos interjected to look into fixing it (which he did). I must include Dave's comment to Father C.:

Isn't it handy that people have such differing concepts of what constitutes 'fun'? Yes, please do take over :)

Perl #128950 (possible bug in perl \u string processing) showcases some of the complexities in Unicode, which I found very interesting. You might as well.

In an email forwarded from the perl-unicode mailing list, an issue is raised on the interaction between Encode's utf8 warnings and flags and the warning pragma's utf8 warnings.