Some Perl notes

[Reini Urban <rurban at x-ray dot at>]

Upstream 5.12.0 is to be released today, cygwin not yet.
There are not many changes, so an upgrade should be smoother than for 5.10
http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/HEAD:/pod/perl5120delta.pod

threads and threads:.shared regression on 5.12
==================================
There's a big regression. threads do not work reliably under stress anymore.
Typically there's a Windows deadlock. No failure. it just hangs and
waits, breaking all the tests.
So I was tempted to remove threads completely, but I'll keep it in
with this warning to
use timeouts for such hanging sections.
The author Jerry Hedden knows about it, he's working on cygwin, it's
not cygwin specific.
The first is windows specific, the 2nd when heavily loading many
modules on fast machines.
* [perl #41574] Frequently fails under MSWin32 due to deadlocking bug in Windows
  http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=41574
  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/175332
* [perl #45053] Memory corruption with heavy module loading in threads
  http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=45053

baseaddr=0x5200000 on Windows 7
==========================
I have also now a Windows 7 system to test, and found out that the
currently used
rebase base address of 0x5400000 is too high for Windows 7.
0x5300000 works, but I'll use 0x5200000 to be safe.
If your Windows 7 has typical failures after some update, like
$ perl Makefile.PL
# running Build.PL
      2 [main] perl 7936 D:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe: *** fatal error -
unable to remap
\\?\D:\cygwin\lib\perl5\5.10\i686-cygwin\auto\version\vxs\vxs.dll to
same address as parent: 0xA00000 != 0xA20000
      2 [main] perl 3344 fork: child 7936 - died waiting for dll
loading, errno 11
fix /usr/bin/perlrebase to use
  baseaddr=0x5200000
and run it.
This fixed it for me.

5.12 release plan
============
After several more cycles of tests, together with the 4 CPAN mass testers
Chris Williams, Andy König, Slaven Rezic, Barbie and David Cantrell
(see http://stats.cpantesters.org/testers.html) I will release 5.12 eventually
in the next month.
Now it's too early and it does NOT work out of the box for cygwin.
I also started working to improve Module::Build.
Maybe we'll get threads fixed before.

man
===
I'm still waiting for a man update to support perl-style :: conversion to .
http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2009-09/msg00097.html
-- 
Reini Urban
http://phpwiki.org/           http://murbreak.at/

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