Re: [MacPerl] MacPerl5 and libwww-perl-5b7

[Alan Fry <ajf@afco.demon.co.uk>]

>Paul J. Schinder (schinder@pjstoaster.pg.md.us) writes:

>} Changing the subject to my() problems, with the greatest respect I think
>} you are wrong that Brad Cox' problems lie in this area. The my() in his
>} 'main' is local to the following print, so there is no chance MacPerl can
>} forget it. There is also a my() in the subroutine 'time2str()' but that is
>} also local to the subsequent 'printf', so that variable does not need to be
>} 'remembered' outside the routine.

>Maybe it's not the my bug in this case.  I wasn't worried about "my" in
>the main, or even "my" in the subroutines (although my'ed variables in
>the subroutines can't be seen by anonymous subroutines defined in the
>same subroutine, which causes problems because LWP uses anonymous
>subroutines to read from sockets). I said this was probably the cause
>because most problems of this type (having nulls returned when you
>expect something back) with libwww-perl-5 are due to the my bug.  Only
>LWP::Protocol::file has to be hacked to any great extent because of
>Unixisms; two other routines have to have a single path converted from
>Unix to Mac format. Most of the rest of the changes I made were due to
>MacPerl.

Yes, I see. Though in the particular case of Date.pm the my() variables
remain local to their routines, and there are no subroutines defined within
those routines calling my() variables invisible to MacPerl.

>I don't have a copy of the original 5b6 distribution any more, and I
>may not have saved the original file (I saved most of them, but didn't
>start doing so until several files into hacking).  If @DoW and @MoY
>(defined outside of any subroutine) were declared "my" in the original,
>then Brad Cox's str2time(time2str(time)) will fail in MacPerl.  If not,
>then something else was wrong. Brad sent me e-mail saying that my
>version worked for him, so I suspect that these might have been
>declared "my @DoW = qw(...", etc., in the original, or maybe 5b7 (the
>version that Brad said he tried) was the first version to use
>$current_month and $current_year, which are declared my in 5b9 and
>would be forgotten by MacPerl.

In version 5b6, @DoW and @MoY are not my'ed, although the running variable
$i used to create the %MoY hash is; to guard against a mix-up with any
other $i lurking about presumably.

>I'm *very* curious.  You said yesterday that you're using 5b6?  The
>straight 5b6 distribution from Gisle Aas's site or from CPAN, or did
>you fix it?  And you can, say, do an http get with it, or MIME type a
>file by extension?  If so, this might be a significant clue about the
>my bug, and it would be worth knowing tool or application and PPC or
>68k.

It was in fact from:
ftp://bigblue.pvv.unit.no//store/store/ernie/libwww-perl/libwww-perl-5b6.tar.gz
(where is 'no' -- nova-scotia perhaps). It ran with Brad's script with no
alterations at all. Once I had got the library path right of course. I
haven't done anything else with it yet. The interest was triggered by
Brad's note.

I am using the MacPerl 5.0.6 application on a Powerbook (68030 CPU): system
7.5.1 BTW.

Alan