This Week on p5p 2001/06/03

Jun 4, 2001 by Leon Brocard

Notes

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This was a faily active week with 700 messages.

Testing, testing

Michael Schwern was on a rampage this week attempting to improve the Perl test suite. The current test suite is quite extensive, but maintenance (or even finding which test failed) is currently tricky due to them being numbered. Hugo sums it up very nicely:

As someone who regularly tries to put in the effort to add test cases, I find there is little difference in the effort involved in adding a test case whether or not I have to encode the test number in the test case.

As someone who regularly tries to investigate test failures, the lack of test numbers makes life _much_ more difficult. It isn’t just the time it takes to discover which test failed, but also the fact that it diverts my concentration from the code I want to be thinking about, so that the debugging process becomes that much more difficult.

The rest of his post is also interesting.

Schwern (in his role as Perl Quality Assurance pumpkin) has been slowly improving the available testing tools, such as the Test::Simple module on CPAN, “an extremely simple, extremely basic module for writing tests suitable for CPAN modules and other pursuits”. Instead of simply numbering the tests, it allows tests to be named. From its documentation:

 # This produces "ok 1 - Hell not yet frozen over" (or not ok)
 ok( get_temperature($hell) > 0, 'Hell not yet frozen over' );

Schwern is currently holding off integrating the module into the core until he gets the interface just right. Tony Bowden dreamt about a world of testing and psychology, with convincing arguments about the module.

Schwern also submitted quite a few patches to the test suite to sync the latest version of the Test and Test::Harness modules from CPAN into the core and to improve the test suite.

libnet in the core

Jarkko introduced us to his evil plan to integrate all of CPAN into the Perl core, assimilating libnet this week. libnet contains various client side networking modules, such as Net::FTP, Net::NNTP, Net::POP3, Net::Time and Net::SMTP, but unfortunately requires some initial configuration. The idea was that libnet could be told only once which POP3 server to use, which it would then use by default in future.

Jarkko asked whether configuration could be delayed. There followed some discussion about providing a seperate configuration utility which could be run after configuration-time, some talk (and flames) about a .perlrc per-user configuration file, and testing the modules by shipping small fake servers. No concensus was reached.

Warnings crusade

It was very much a week of patches from Schwern, who continued on his crusade to make Perl compile cleanly under -Wall, jumping over hoops sometimes to get rid of warnings.

After a slew of patches, Schwern suggested making -Wall the default to stop new patches containing warnings. Jarkko made it so, with the slightly suprising problem that Perl no longer compiled on Solaris with gcc. The culprit turned out to be -ansi, which has been temporarily removed.

Various

Hugo posted a wonderful comparison of various benchmarks containing the experimental ?> regular expression feature, along with a small discussion of the regular expression optimiser.

Tye McQueen posted a small patch attempting to make pathological hash keys much more unlikely.

H.Merijn Brand posted some patches to get Perl running on AIX and gcc.

There was some more talk on documenting sort as stable, with perhaps having a pragma such as use sort qw( stable unique );.

Jarkko submitted some UTF bug reports and proceeded to fix some.

Ilya provided some more OS/2 patches.

Ilmari Karonen provided an interesting bug report which was produced by his Markov chain random input tester.

Hugo provided a patch to stop Atof numifying “0xa” to 10. At the moment Perl was relying on the system’s atof which turns out to be different on different platforms, so we now have an implementation in Perl.

Jarkko attempted to make use utf8 the default, allowing us to write our scripts in UTF-8. It was shot down very rapidly by the backwards-compatibility police due to no longer allowing naked bytes with the eight bit, such as the pound character.

Doug MacEachern posted some patches to clean up and optimise Cwd.pm.

Until next week I remain, your temporarily-replaced humble and obedient servant,

Leon Brocard, leon@iterative-software.com