Re: Package namespace and Safe init cleanup for plperl [PATCH]

David E. Wheeler wrote:
> On Feb 13, 2010, at 3:35 PM, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
>
>> To perform initialisation, such as setting a value in %_SHARED.
>>
>
> Hrm. Well, as a DBA, I'd *really* like to be able to make some things available from within a Safe container, such as Devel::NYTProf::PgPLPerl or the PostgreSQL::PLPerl::Call module that Tim's working on. Right now I can do that by hacking warnings.pm directly or by the method you figured out a few weeks ago, which isn't really all that nasty.
>
> I'm not sure that Tim's interface is the best approach to giving DBAs the ability to do this from within PostgreSQL, but I'm hard-pressed to come up with a better interface. But I do think it should be allowed.
>

I am not saying we shouldn't. But that's a new feature, and we do have a
process to follow. I think it's long past the time when we can accept
new features which have had almost no discussion.

And I am saying that any facility we provide for it has to be known and
documented.

Clearly there are modules which could probably be used with reasonable
safety. Math::BigInt and MIME::Base64 are examples that come to mind as
likely candidates.

But I am not prepared to commit a patch providing this facility based on
just having a variable declared using "use vars" rather than "my",
without a word in the docs, and with almost no discussion on -hackers,
and that discussion starting two weeks after the start of the final
commitfest. That's just not the way we do things round here, AIUI.

cheers

andrew