File::ExtAttr 1.09

AKA the “reduce the CPAN Testers FAIL results” release.

I also fixed a minor bug on Solaris, and documented a difference in the handling of empty attribute values on Mac OS X 10.4 vs. 10.5. See File::ExtAttr on CPAN soon.

Changelog:

1.09 2009-03-07

    - (richdawe) Add note to README about needing to install
                 package that provides the headers <attr/attributes.h>
                 and <attr/xattr.h>.

    - (richdawe) Fix RT #31970: "OS X: setfattr fails to set empty value".
                 According to the CPAN Testers results, this works
                 on Mac OS X 10.5.

                 Skip the "empty" tests on Mac OS X 10.4 and earlier.
                 Document issue.

    - (richdawe) Fix #34394: "Test suite should skip on filesystems
                 with no xattr support when run non-interactively"
                 on Linux.

                 When run interactively, it will suggest what you need
                 to do, to get the test suite to pass.

    - (richdawe) Fix RT #37889: "Crash when operating on a closed file handle
                 on Solaris". This was due to using an uninitialised
                 directory handle.


  
  
  

File::ExtAttr 1.08, (Open)Solaris and 2 xattr schemes

I released File::ExtAttr 1.08, which has some changes to make it report errors more consistently ($! should always contain the value of errno now). It also has some build changes, which will hopefully avoid all the CPAN Testers FAIL reports on platforms that don’t have the development packages installed for using xattrs (libattr-devel rpm on Linux).

I development this release on various platforms, but the most exciting one was OpenSolaris 2008.05 (AKA Project Indiana). This is so much easier to install and use than Solaris 10. It’s much more like using a Linux distro. The OpenSolaris LiveCD is very easy to install, and things just seem to work. It took about 6 steps to get a fully functional development environment for File::ExtAttr.

File::ExtAttr 1.06, mab2ldif

I released File::ExtAttr 1.06 to fix building on Mac OS X. File::ExtAttr provides an interface to extended file attributes (meta-data) that’s consistent across Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, Solaris.

I also released mab2ldif, which takes a Mork-format address book (e.g.: as used by Thunderbird) and converts it into an LDIF file. You can import the LDIF file into Thunderbird. I wrote this to recover my old Thunderbird address book from an old computer that died. You can actually export the address book from Thunderbird into LDIF, but if Thunderbird won’t run, you’ll need this tool to get your data back.

Perl and DTrace

I saw on Adam Leventhal’s blog that Apple ship a DTrace provider for Perl with Leopard:

It’s also mentioned on Unix Technology page for Leopard.

I had a quick look to see if Apple had released any patches. I didn’t find any – at some point I should dig around their open source section, to see if it’s included in that.

Perl and DTrace

I finally got DTrace working on Perl, as described in Alan Burlison’s blog post on how to DTrace Perl. I have a patch to add DTrace support to Perl, which includes some instructions and example scripts.

I’m giving a talk on DTrace and Perl next Wednesday evening at Birmingham Perl Mongers.