perl-changes mailing list

The perl5-changes mailing list receives a copy of each patch that gets submitted to the maintenance and development branches of the perl repository. See <https://lists.perl.org/list/perl5-changes.html> for subscription and archive information.

#p5p on IRC

Many porters are also active on the <irc://irc.perl.org/#p5p> channel. Feel free to join the channel and ask questions about hacking on the Perl core.

Read access via Git

You will need a copy of Git for your computer. You can fetch a copy of the repository using the git protocol:

  % git clone git://github.com/Perl/perl5.git perl

This clones the repository and makes a local copy in the perl directory.

If you cannot use the git protocol for firewall reasons, you can also clone via http:

  % git clone https://github.com/Perl/perl5.git perl

Read access via the web

You may access the repository over the web. This allows you to browse the tree, see recent commits, subscribe to repository notifications, search for particular commits and more. You may access it at <https://github.com/Perl/perl5>.

Read access via rsync

You can also choose to use rsync to get a copy of the current source tree for the bleadperl branch and all maintenance branches:

  % rsync -avz rsync://perl5.git.perl.org/perl-current .
  % rsync -avz rsync://perl5.git.perl.org/perl-5.12.x .
  % rsync -avz rsync://perl5.git.perl.org/perl-5.10.x .
  % rsync -avz rsync://perl5.git.perl.org/perl-5.8.x .
  % rsync -avz rsync://perl5.git.perl.org/perl-5.6.x .
  % rsync -avz rsync://perl5.git.perl.org/perl-5.005xx .

(Add the "--delete" option to remove leftover files.)

To get a full list of the available sync points:

  % rsync perl5.git.perl.org::

Write access via git

If you have a commit bit, please see perlgit for more details on using git.

Submitting patches

If you have a small patch to submit, please submit it via the GitHub Pull Request workflow. You may also send patches to the p5p list.

Patches are reviewed and discussed on GitHub or the p5p list. Simple, uncontroversial patches will usually be applied without any discussion. When the patch is applied, the ticket will be updated and you will receive email.

In other cases, the patch will need more work or discussion. You are encouraged to participate in the discussion and advocate for your patch. Sometimes your patch may get lost in the shuffle. It's appropriate to send a reminder email to p5p if no action has been taken in a month. Please remember that the Perl 5 developers are all volunteers, and be polite.

Changes are always applied directly to the main development branch, called "blead". Some patches may be backported to a maintenance branch. If you think your patch is appropriate for the maintenance branch (see "MAINTENANCE BRANCHES" in perlpolicy), please explain why when you submit it.

Getting your patch accepted

If you are submitting a code patch there are several things that you can do to help the Perl 5 Porters accept your patch.

Patch style

Using the GitHub Pull Request workflow, your patch will automatically be available in a suitable format. If you wish to submit a patch to the p5p list for review, make sure to create it appropriately.

If you used git to check out the Perl source, then using "git format-patch" will produce a patch in a style suitable for Perl. The "format-patch" command produces one patch file for each commit you made. If you prefer to send a single patch for all commits, you can use "git diff".

  % git checkout blead
  % git pull
  % git diff blead my-branch-name

This produces a patch based on the difference between blead and your current branch. It's important to make sure that blead is up to date before producing the diff, that's why we call "git pull" first.

We strongly recommend that you use git if possible. It will make your life easier, and ours as well.

However, if you're not using git, you can still produce a suitable patch. You'll need a pristine copy of the Perl source to diff against. The porters prefer unified diffs. Using GNU "diff", you can produce a diff like this:

  % diff -Npurd perl.pristine perl.mine

Make sure that you "make realclean" in your copy of Perl to remove any build artifacts, or you may get a confusing result.

Commit message

As you craft each patch you intend to submit to the Perl core, it's important to write a good commit message. This is especially important if your submission will consist of a series of commits.

The first line of the commit message should be a short description without a period. It should be no longer than the subject line of an email, 50 characters being a good rule of thumb.

A lot of Git tools (Gitweb, GitHub, git log --pretty=oneline, ...) will only display the first line (cut off at 50 characters) when presenting commit summaries.

The commit message should include a description of the problem that the patch corrects or new functionality that the patch adds.

As a general rule of thumb, your commit message should help a programmer who knows the Perl core quickly understand what you were trying to do, how you were trying to do it, and why the change matters to Perl.

• Why

  Your commit message should describe why the change you are making is important. When someone looks at your change in six months or six years, your intent should be clear.

  If you're deprecating a feature with the intent of later simplifying another bit of code, say so. If you're fixing a performance problem or adding a new feature to support some other bit of the core, mention that.

• What

  Your commit message should describe what part of the Perl core you're changing and what you expect your patch to do.

• How

  While it's not necessary for documentation changes, new tests or trivial patches, it's often worth explaining how your change works. Even if it's clear to you today, it may not be clear to a porter next month or next year.

A commit message isn't intended to take the place of comments in your code. Commit messages should describe the change you made, while code comments should describe the current state of the code.

If you've just implemented a new feature, complete with doc, tests and well-commented code, a brief commit message will often suffice. If, however, you've just changed a single character deep in the parser or lexer, you might need to write a small novel to ensure that future readers understand what you did and why you did it.

Comments, Comments, Comments

Be sure to adequately comment your code. While commenting every line is unnecessary, anything that takes advantage of side effects of operators, that creates changes that will be felt outside of the function being patched, or that others may find confusing should be documented. If you are going to err, it is better to err on the side of adding too many comments than too few.

The best comments explain why the code does what it does, not what it does.

Style

In general, please follow the particular style of the code you are patching.

In particular, follow these general guidelines for patching Perl sources:

• 4-wide indents for code, 2-wide indents for nested CPP "#define"s, with 8-wide tabstops.
• Use spaces for indentation, not tab characters.

  The codebase is a mixture of tabs and spaces for indentation, and we are moving to spaces only. Converting lines you're patching from 8-wide tabs to spaces will help this migration.

• Try hard not to exceed 79-columns
• ANSI C prototypes
• Uncuddled elses and "K&R" style for indenting control constructs
• No C++ style (//) comments
• Mark places that need to be revisited with XXX (and revisit often!)
• Opening brace lines up with "if" when conditional spans multiple lines; should be at end-of-line otherwise
• In function definitions, name starts in column 0 (return value-type is on previous line)
• Single space after keywords that are followed by parens, no space between function name and following paren
• Avoid assignments in conditionals, but if they're unavoidable, use extra paren, e.g. "if (a && (b = c)) ..."
• "return foo;" rather than "return(foo);"
• "if (!foo) ..." rather than "if (foo == FALSE) ..." etc.
• Do not declare variables using "register". It may be counterproductive with modern compilers, and is deprecated in C++, under which the Perl source is regularly compiled.
• In-line functions that are in headers that are accessible to XS code need to be able to compile without warnings with commonly used extra compilation flags, such as gcc's "-Wswitch-default" which warns whenever a switch statement does not have a "default" case. The use of these extra flags is to catch potential problems in legal C code, and is often used by Perl aggregators, such as Linux distributors.

Test suite

If your patch changes code (rather than just changing documentation), you should also include one or more test cases which illustrate the bug you're fixing or validate the new functionality you're adding. In general, you should update an existing test file rather than create a new one.

Your test suite additions should generally follow these guidelines (courtesy of Gurusamy Sarathy <gsar@activestate.com>):

• Know what you're testing. Read the docs, and the source.
• Tend to fail, not succeed.
• Interpret results strictly.
• Use unrelated features (this will flush out bizarre interactions).
• Use non-standard idioms (otherwise you are not testing TIMTOWTDI).
• Avoid using hardcoded test numbers whenever possible (the EXPECTED/GOT found in t/op/tie.t is much more maintainable, and gives better failure reports).
• Give meaningful error messages when a test fails.
• Avoid using qx// and system() unless you are testing for them. If you do use them, make sure that you cover _all_ perl platforms.
• Unlink any temporary files you create.
• Promote unforeseen warnings to errors with $SIG{__WARN__}.
• Be sure to use the libraries and modules shipped with the version being tested, not those that were already installed.
• Add comments to the code explaining what you are testing for.
• Make updating the '1..42' string unnecessary. Or make sure that you update it.
• Test _all_ behaviors of a given operator, library, or function.

  Test all optional arguments.

  Test return values in various contexts (boolean, scalar, list, lvalue).

  Use both global and lexical variables.

  Don't forget the exceptional, pathological cases.

Patching a core module

This works just like patching anything else, with one extra consideration.

Modules in the cpan/ directory of the source tree are maintained outside of the Perl core. When the author updates the module, the updates are simply copied into the core. See that module's documentation or its listing on <https://metacpan.org/> for more information on reporting bugs and submitting patches.

In most cases, patches to modules in cpan/ should be sent upstream and should not be applied to the Perl core individually. If a patch to a file in cpan/ absolutely cannot wait for the fix to be made upstream, released to CPAN and copied to blead, you must add (or update) a "CUSTOMIZED" entry in the "Porting/Maintainers.pl" file to flag that a local modification has been made. See "Porting/Maintainers.pl" for more details.

In contrast, modules in the dist/ directory are maintained in the core.

Updating perldelta

For changes significant enough to warrant a pod/perldelta.pod entry, the porters will greatly appreciate it if you submit a delta entry along with your actual change. Significant changes include, but are not limited to:

• Adding, deprecating, or removing core features
• Adding, deprecating, removing, or upgrading core or dual-life modules
• Adding new core tests
• Fixing security issues and user-visible bugs in the core
• Changes that might break existing code, either on the perl or C level
• Significant performance improvements
• Adding, removing, or significantly changing documentation in the pod/ directory
• Important platform-specific changes

Please make sure you add the perldelta entry to the right section within pod/perldelta.pod. More information on how to write good perldelta entries is available in the "Style" section of Porting/how_to_write_a_perldelta.pod.

What makes for a good patch?

New features and extensions to the language can be contentious. There is no specific set of criteria which determine what features get added, but here are some questions to consider when developing a patch:

Does the concept match the general goals of Perl?

Our goals include, but are not limited to:

1.

Keep it fast, simple, and useful.

2.

Keep features/concepts as orthogonal as possible.

3.

No arbitrary limits (platforms, data sizes, cultures).

4.

Keep it open and exciting to use/patch/advocate Perl everywhere.

5.

Either assimilate new technologies, or build bridges to them.

Where is the implementation?

All the talk in the world is useless without an implementation. In almost every case, the person or people who argue for a new feature will be expected to be the ones who implement it. Porters capable of coding new features have their own agendas, and are not available to implement your (possibly good) idea.

Backwards compatibility

It's a cardinal sin to break existing Perl programs. New warnings can be contentious--some say that a program that emits warnings is not broken, while others say it is. Adding keywords has the potential to break programs, changing the meaning of existing token sequences or functions might break programs.

The Perl 5 core includes mechanisms to help porters make backwards incompatible changes more compatible such as the feature and deprecate modules. Please use them when appropriate.

Could it be a module instead?

Perl 5 has extension mechanisms, modules and XS, specifically to avoid the need to keep changing the Perl interpreter. You can write modules that export functions, you can give those functions prototypes so they can be called like built-in functions, you can even write XS code to mess with the runtime data structures of the Perl interpreter if you want to implement really complicated things.

Whenever possible, new features should be prototyped in a CPAN module before they will be considered for the core.

Is the feature generic enough?

Is this something that only the submitter wants added to the language, or is it broadly useful? Sometimes, instead of adding a feature with a tight focus, the porters might decide to wait until someone implements the more generalized feature.

Does it potentially introduce new bugs?

Radical rewrites of large chunks of the Perl interpreter have the potential to introduce new bugs.

How big is it?

The smaller and more localized the change, the better. Similarly, a series of small patches is greatly preferred over a single large patch.

Does it preclude other desirable features?

A patch is likely to be rejected if it closes off future avenues of development. For instance, a patch that placed a true and final interpretation on prototypes is likely to be rejected because there are still options for the future of prototypes that haven't been addressed.

Is the implementation robust?

Good patches (tight code, complete, correct) stand more chance of going in. Sloppy or incorrect patches might be placed on the back burner until fixes can be made, or they might be discarded altogether without further notice.

Is the implementation generic enough to be portable?

The worst patches make use of system-specific features. It's highly unlikely that non-portable additions to the Perl language will be accepted.

Is the implementation tested?

Patches which change behaviour (fixing bugs or introducing new features) must include regression tests to verify that everything works as expected.

Without tests provided by the original author, how can anyone else changing perl in the future be sure that they haven't unwittingly broken the behaviour the patch implements? And without tests, how can the patch's author be confident that his/her hard work put into the patch won't be accidentally thrown away by someone in the future?

Is there enough documentation?

Patches without documentation are probably ill-thought out or incomplete. No features can be added or changed without documentation, so submitting a patch for the appropriate pod docs as well as the source code is important.

Is there another way to do it?

Larry said "Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something". This is a tricky heuristic to navigate, though--one man's essential addition is another man's pointless cruft.

Does it create too much work?

Work for the committers, work for Perl programmers, work for module authors, ... Perl is supposed to be easy.

Patches speak louder than words

Working code is always preferred to pie-in-the-sky ideas. A patch to add a feature stands a much higher chance of making it to the language than does a random feature request, no matter how fervently argued the request might be. This ties into "Will it be useful?", as the fact that someone took the time to make the patch demonstrates a strong desire for the feature.

Special "make test" targets

There are various special make targets that can be used to test Perl slightly differently than the standard "test" target. Not all them are expected to give a 100% success rate. Many of them have several aliases, and many of them are not available on certain operating systems.

• test_porting

  This runs some basic sanity tests on the source tree and helps catch basic errors before you submit a patch.

• minitest

  Run miniperl on t/base, t/comp, t/cmd, t/run, t/io, t/op, t/uni and t/mro tests.

  miniperl is a minimalistic perl built to bootstrap building extensions, utilties, documentation etc. It doesn't support dynamic loading and depending on the point in the build process will only have access to a limited set of core modules. miniperl is not intended for day to day use.

• test.valgrind check.valgrind

  (Only in Linux) Run all the tests using the memory leak + naughty memory access tool "valgrind". The log files will be named testname.valgrind.

• test_harness

  Run the test suite with the t/harness controlling program, instead of t/TEST. t/harness is more sophisticated, and uses the Test::Harness module, thus using this test target supposes that perl mostly works. The main advantage for our purposes is that it prints a detailed summary of failed tests at the end. Also, unlike t/TEST, it doesn't redirect stderr to stdout.

  Note that under Win32 t/harness is always used instead of t/TEST, so there is no special "test_harness" target.

  Under Win32's "test" target you may use the TEST_SWITCHES and TEST_FILES environment variables to control the behaviour of t/harness. This means you can say

      nmake test TEST_FILES="op/*.t"
      nmake test TEST_SWITCHES="-torture" TEST_FILES="op/*.t"
      

• test-notty test_notty

  Sets PERL_SKIP_TTY_TEST to true before running normal test.

Parallel tests

The core distribution can now run its regression tests in parallel on Unix-like platforms. Instead of running "make test", set "TEST_JOBS" in your environment to the number of tests to run in parallel, and run "make test_harness". On a Bourne-like shell, this can be done as

    TEST_JOBS=3 make test_harness  # Run 3 tests in parallel

An environment variable is used, rather than parallel make itself, because TAP::Harness needs to be able to schedule individual non-conflicting test scripts itself, and there is no standard interface to "make" utilities to interact with their job schedulers.

Note that currently some test scripts may fail when run in parallel (most notably dist/IO/t/io_dir.t). If necessary, run just the failing scripts again sequentially and see if the failures go away.

Running tests by hand

You can run part of the test suite by hand by using one of the following commands from the t/ directory:

    ./perl -I../lib TEST list-of-.t-files

or

    ./perl -I../lib harness list-of-.t-files

(If you don't specify test scripts, the whole test suite will be run.)

Using t/harness for testing

If you use "harness" for testing, you have several command line options available to you. The arguments are as follows, and are in the order that they must appear if used together.

    harness -v -torture -re=pattern LIST OF FILES TO TEST
    harness -v -torture -re LIST OF PATTERNS TO MATCH

If "LIST OF FILES TO TEST" is omitted, the file list is obtained from the manifest. The file list may include shell wildcards which will be expanded out.

• -v

  Run the tests under verbose mode so you can see what tests were run, and debug output.

• -torture

  Run the torture tests as well as the normal set.

• -re=PATTERN

  Filter the file list so that all the test files run match PATTERN. Note that this form is distinct from the -re LIST OF PATTERNS form below in that it allows the file list to be provided as well.

• -re LIST OF PATTERNS

  Filter the file list so that all the test files run match /(LIST|OF|PATTERNS)/. Note that with this form the patterns are joined by '|' and you cannot supply a list of files, instead the test files are obtained from the MANIFEST.

You can run an individual test by a command similar to

    ./perl -I../lib path/to/foo.t

except that the harnesses set up some environment variables that may affect the execution of the test:

• PERL_CORE=1

  indicates that we're running this test as part of the perl core test suite. This is useful for modules that have a dual life on CPAN.

• PERL_DESTRUCT_LEVEL=2

  is set to 2 if it isn't set already (see "PERL_DESTRUCT_LEVEL" in perlhacktips).

• PERL

  (used only by t/TEST) if set, overrides the path to the perl executable that should be used to run the tests (the default being ./perl).

• PERL_SKIP_TTY_TEST

  if set, tells to skip the tests that need a terminal. It's actually set automatically by the Makefile, but can also be forced artificially by running 'make test_notty'.

Other environment variables that may influence tests

• PERL_TEST_Net_Ping

  Setting this variable runs all the Net::Ping modules tests, otherwise some tests that interact with the outside world are skipped. See perl58delta.

• PERL_TEST_NOVREXX

  Setting this variable skips the vrexx.t tests for OS2::REXX.

• PERL_TEST_NUMCONVERTS

  This sets a variable in op/numconvert.t.

• PERL_TEST_MEMORY

  Setting this variable includes the tests in t/bigmem/. This should be set to the number of gigabytes of memory available for testing, eg. "PERL_TEST_MEMORY=4" indicates that tests that require 4GiB of available memory can be run safely.

See also the documentation for the Test and Test::Harness modules, for more environment variables that affect testing.

Performance testing

The file t/perf/benchmarks contains snippets of perl code which are intended to be benchmarked across a range of perls by the Porting/bench.pl tool. If you fix or enhance a performance issue, you may want to add a representative code sample to the file, then run bench.pl against the previous and current perls to see what difference it has made, and whether anything else has slowed down as a consequence.

The file t/perf/opcount.t is designed to test whether a particular code snippet has been compiled into an optree containing specified numbers of particular op types. This is good for testing whether optimisations which alter ops, such as converting an "aelem" op into an "aelemfast" op, are really doing that.

The files t/perf/speed.t and t/re/speed.t are designed to test things that run thousands of times slower if a particular optimisation is broken (for example, the utf8 length cache on long utf8 strings). Add a test that will take a fraction of a second normally, and minutes otherwise, causing the test file to time out on failure.

Building perl at older commits

In the course of hacking on the Perl core distribution, you may have occasion to configure, build and test perl at an old commit. Sometimes "make" will fail during this process. If that happens, you may be able to salvage the situation by using the Devel::PatchPerl library from CPAN (not included in the core) to bring the source code at that commit to a buildable state.

Here's a real world example, taken from work done to resolve perl #10118 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/10118>. Use of Porting/bisect.pl had identified commit "ba77e4cc9d1ceebf472c9c5c18b2377ee47062e6" as the commit in which a bug was corrected. To confirm, a P5P developer wanted to configure and build perl at commit "ba77e4c^" (presumably "bad") and then at "ba77e4c" (presumably "good"). Normal configuration and build was attempted:

    $ sh ./Configure -des -Dusedevel
    $ make test_prep

"make", however, failed with output (excerpted) like this:

    cc -fstack-protector -L/usr/local/lib -o miniperl \
      gv.o toke.o perly.o pad.o regcomp.o dump.o util.o \
      mg.o reentr.o mro.o hv.o av.o run.o pp_hot.o sv.o \
      pp.o scope.o pp_ctl.o pp_sys.o doop.o doio.o regexec.o \
      utf8.o taint.o deb.o universal.o globals.o perlio.o \
      perlapi.o numeric.o mathoms.o locale.o pp_pack.o pp_sort.o  \
      miniperlmain.o opmini.o perlmini.o
    pp.o: In function `Perl_pp_pow':
    pp.c:(.text+0x2db9): undefined reference to `pow'
    ...
    collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
    makefile:348: recipe for target 'miniperl' failed
    make: *** [miniperl] Error 1

Another P5P contributor recommended installation and use of Devel::PatchPerl for this situation, first to determine the version of perl at the commit in question, then to patch the source code at that point to facilitate a build.

    $ perl -MDevel::PatchPerl -e \
        'print Devel::PatchPerl->determine_version("/path/to/sourcecode"), "\n";'
    5.11.1
    $ perl -MDevel::PatchPerl -e \
        'Devel::PatchPerl->patch_source("5.11.1", "/path/to/sourcecode");'

Once the source was patched, "./Configure" and "make test_prep" were called and completed successfully, enabling confirmation of the findings in RT #72414.

"The Road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began."

If you can do these things, you've started on the long road to Perl porting. Thanks for wanting to help make Perl better - and happy hacking!

Metaphoric Quotations

If you recognized the quote about the Road above, you're in luck.

Most software projects begin each file with a literal description of each file's purpose. Perl instead begins each with a literary allusion to that file's purpose.

Like chapters in many books, all top-level Perl source files (along with a few others here and there) begin with an epigrammatic inscription that alludes, indirectly and metaphorically, to the material you're about to read.

Quotations are taken from writings of J.R.R. Tolkien pertaining to his Legendarium, almost always from The Lord of the Rings. Chapters and page numbers are given using the following editions:

• The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The hardcover, 70th-anniversary edition of 2007 was used, published in the UK by Harper Collins Publishers and in the US by the Houghton Mifflin Company.
• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The hardcover, 50th-anniversary edition of 2004 was used, published in the UK by Harper Collins Publishers and in the US by the Houghton Mifflin Company.
• The Lays of Beleriand, by J.R.R. Tolkien and published posthumously by his son and literary executor, C.J.R. Tolkien, being the 3rd of the 12 volumes in Christopher's mammoth History of Middle Earth. Page numbers derive from the hardcover edition, first published in 1983 by George Allen & Unwin; no page numbers changed for the special 3-volume omnibus edition of 2002 or the various trade-paper editions, all again now by Harper Collins or Houghton Mifflin.

Other JRRT books fair game for quotes would thus include The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The Tale of the Children of Hurin, all but the first posthumously assembled by CJRT. But The Lord of the Rings itself is perfectly fine and probably best to quote from, provided you can find a suitable quote there.

So if you were to supply a new, complete, top-level source file to add to Perl, you should conform to this peculiar practice by yourself selecting an appropriate quotation from Tolkien, retaining the original spelling and punctuation and using the same format the rest of the quotes are in. Indirect and oblique is just fine; remember, it's a metaphor, so being meta is, after all, what it's for.