Perl Source Hack

Todd Rinaldo lead the hacking session, mostly by driving our walk through the Perl RT queue. We looked at a few bugs to decide:

• Were they still open?
• Did we understand the problem?
• Could we reproduce it?
• DId we think we could fix it in the time we had?

We looked at a Here doc issue in a regex ?{} expression that seems to have been fixed with Perl version 5.22.

Next, we looked at a Data::Dumper problem that seemed to be caused by round-tripping some cross-referenced structures. After looking at it for a little while, we could see the poster's point, but really weren't completely sure he was right. Even if he was, we could not see any way to solve it in a reasonable period of time.

Then, we looked at a reported strangeness with the tr/// operator when ' is used as the delimiter. A small amount of looking convinced us that we were probably not up to the challenge of debugging this in the time we were meeting.

Finally, we found a reported problem with perlbug where the --help option returned a surprising message. After a bit of digging we found that Getopt::Std actually captures and handles a couple of options directly: --help and --version. The module does provide a way to override it's behavior. We modified perlbug to use this feature and call it's own help messaging.

After testing, Todd submitted the code fix to the RT queue, referencing Houston.pm.

All in all, it was an interesting and fun exercise. The group as a whole provided some interesting commentary and got some insight into how we might be able to help improve Perl directly.

We had 7 people attending this month. As always, we'd like to thank cPanel, Inc. for providing the meeting space and food for the group.