I'm very pleased to say that I've just been granted with a partial commit bit for the Subversion source code. The developers have had enough of me popping up on the mailing list talking about issues with the Perl bindings and posting patches, and have given me the necessary access rights to fix and improve things myself.
As is traditional, my first commit was to the list of Subversion committers. This ensures that the ACLs are set up correctly and so on.
I'll be working on the perl-bindings-improvements branch, making sure that they're up to date with respect to the rest of Subversion, and that they behave as "Perlishly" as possible for anyone else who needs to interoperate with Subversion repositories using Perl.
Does this mean that users of the perl client libraries won't need to explicitly allocate and de-allocate apr pools? That'd be nice and perlish.
ReplyDeleteYou don't need to explicitly use pools at the moment. The pool param to the calls is (AFAIK) always optional.
ReplyDeleteYou can use pools if you want to. For example, if you're iterating over a lot of objects the "standard" approach is to allocate a subpool before you start the iteration, and clear it at the start of each iteration, so that memory usage doesn't grow, and operations tend to take O(1) memory rather than O(n).
You don't need to do that now if you don't want to though.
I agree that having to worry about this at all isn't terribly Perlish (although, I guess, not much more so than having to worry about references, cyclic references, weakening them, and so on).
The sort of stuff I'm immediately looking at is getting the API to support named parameters for calls as well as the positional parameters, and, where possible, to supply default values for those parameters so that your Perl code can be simpler and more readable. I'm working on a patch (which will be committed) for that at the moment.
Oh, one more thing -- I'm interested in apps, libraries, utilities and the like that people are creating using the Perl bindings. Can you tell me a bit about what you're using them for?
ReplyDelete