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Revision: 1.1
Committed: Tue Jul 30 23:27:09 2013 UTC (10 years, 10 months ago) by root
Branch: MAIN
CVS Tags: rel-3_7, rel-3_71, rel-3_72
Log Message:
3.7

File Contents

# User Rev Content
1 root 1.1 =head1 NAME
2    
3     common::sense - save a tree AND a kitten, use common::sense!
4    
5     =head1 SYNOPSIS
6    
7     use common::sense;
8    
9     # Supposed to be mostly the same, with much lower memory usage, as:
10    
11     # use utf8;
12     # use strict qw(vars subs);
13     # use feature qw(say state switch);
14     # use feature qw(unicode_strings unicode_eval current_sub fc evalbytes);
15     # no feature qw(array_base);
16     # no warnings;
17     # use warnings qw(FATAL closed threads internal debugging pack
18     # portable prototype inplace io pipe unpack malloc
19     # deprecated glob digit printf layer
20     # reserved taint closure semicolon);
21     # no warnings qw(exec newline unopened);
22    
23     =head1 DESCRIPTION
24    
25     “Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks
26     he needs more of it than he already has.”
27    
28     – René Descartes
29    
30     This module implements some sane defaults for Perl programs, as defined by
31     two typical (or not so typical - use your common sense) specimens of Perl
32     coders. In fact, after working out details on which warnings and strict
33     modes to enable and make fatal, we found that we (and our code written so
34     far, and others) fully agree on every option, even though we never used
35     warnings before, so it seems this module indeed reflects a "common" sense
36     among some long-time Perl coders.
37    
38     The basic philosophy behind the choices made in common::sense can be
39     summarised as: "enforcing strict policies to catch as many bugs as
40     possible, while at the same time, not limiting the expressive power
41     available to the programmer".
42    
43     Two typical examples of how this philosophy is applied in practise is the
44     handling of uninitialised and malloc warnings:
45    
46     =over 4
47    
48     =item I<uninitialised>
49    
50     C<undef> is a well-defined feature of perl, and enabling warnings for
51     using it rarely catches any bugs, but considerably limits you in what you
52     can do, so uninitialised warnings are disabled.
53    
54     =item I<malloc>
55    
56     Freeing something twice on the C level is a serious bug, usually causing
57     memory corruption. It often leads to side effects much later in the
58     program and there are no advantages to not reporting this, so malloc
59     warnings are fatal by default.
60    
61     =back
62    
63     Unfortunately, there is no fine-grained warning control in perl, so often
64     whole groups of useful warnings had to be excluded because of a single
65     useless warning (for example, perl puts an arbitrary limit on the length
66     of text you can match with some regexes before emitting a warning, making
67     the whole C<regexp> category useless).
68    
69     What follows is a more thorough discussion of what this module does,
70     and why it does it, and what the advantages (and disadvantages) of this
71     approach are.
72    
73     =head1 RATIONALE
74    
75     =over 4
76    
77     =item use utf8
78    
79     While it's not common sense to write your programs in UTF-8, it's quickly
80     becoming the most common encoding, is the designated future default
81     encoding for perl sources, and the most convenient encoding available
82     (you can do really nice quoting tricks...). Experience has shown that our
83     programs were either all pure ascii or utf-8, both of which will stay the
84     same.
85    
86     There are few drawbacks to enabling UTF-8 source code by default (mainly
87     some speed hits due to bugs in older versions of perl), so this module
88     enables UTF-8 source code encoding by default.
89    
90    
91     =item use strict qw(subs vars)
92    
93     Using C<use strict> is definitely common sense, but C<use strict
94     'refs'> definitely overshoots its usefulness. After almost two
95     decades of Perl hacking, we decided that it does more harm than being
96     useful. Specifically, constructs like these:
97    
98     @{ $var->[0] }
99    
100     Must be written like this (or similarly), when C<use strict 'refs'> is in
101     scope, and C<$var> can legally be C<undef>:
102    
103     @{ $var->[0] || [] }
104    
105     This is annoying, and doesn't shield against obvious mistakes such as
106     using C<"">, so one would even have to write (at least for the time
107     being):
108    
109     @{ defined $var->[0] ? $var->[0] : [] }
110    
111     ... which nobody with a bit of common sense would consider
112     writing: clear code is clearly something else.
113    
114     Curiously enough, sometimes perl is not so strict, as this works even with
115     C<use strict> in scope:
116    
117     for (@{ $var->[0] }) { ...
118    
119     If that isn't hypocrisy! And all that from a mere program!
120    
121    
122     =item use feature qw(say state given ...)
123    
124     We found it annoying that we always have to enable extra features. If
125     something breaks because it didn't anticipate future changes, so be
126     it. 5.10 broke almost all our XS modules and nobody cared either (or at
127     least I know of nobody who really complained about gratuitous changes -
128     as opposed to bugs).
129    
130     Few modules that are not actively maintained work with newer versions of
131     Perl, regardless of use feature or not, so a new major perl release means
132     changes to many modules - new keywords are just the tip of the iceberg.
133    
134     If your code isn't alive, it's dead, Jim - be an active maintainer.
135    
136     But nobody forces you to use those extra features in modules meant for
137     older versions of perl - common::sense of course works there as well.
138     There is also an important other mode where having additional features by
139     default is useful: commandline hacks and internal use scripts: See "much
140     reduced typing", below.
141    
142     There is one notable exception: C<unicode_eval> is not enabled by
143     default. In our opinion, C<use feature> had one main effect - newer perl
144     versions don't value backwards compatibility and the ability to write
145     modules for multiple perl versions much, after all, you can use feature.
146    
147     C<unicode_eval> doesn't add a new feature, it breaks an existing function.
148    
149     =item no warnings, but a lot of new errors
150    
151     Ah, the dreaded warnings. Even worse, the horribly dreaded C<-w>
152     switch: Even though we don't care if other people use warnings (and
153     certainly there are useful ones), a lot of warnings simply go against the
154     spirit of Perl.
155    
156     Most prominently, the warnings related to C<undef>. There is nothing wrong
157     with C<undef>: it has well-defined semantics, it is useful, and spitting
158     out warnings you never asked for is just evil.
159    
160     The result was that every one of our modules did C<no warnings> in the
161     past, to avoid somebody accidentally using and forcing his bad standards
162     on our code. Of course, this switched off all warnings, even the useful
163     ones. Not a good situation. Really, the C<-w> switch should only enable
164     warnings for the main program only.
165    
166     Funnily enough, L<perllexwarn> explicitly mentions C<-w> (and not in a
167     favourable way, calling it outright "wrong"), but standard utilities, such
168     as L<prove>, or MakeMaker when running C<make test>, still enable them
169     blindly.
170    
171     For version 2 of common::sense, we finally sat down a few hours and went
172     through I<every single warning message>, identifying - according to
173     common sense - all the useful ones.
174    
175     This resulted in the rather impressive list in the SYNOPSIS. When we
176     weren't sure, we didn't include the warning, so the list might grow in
177     the future (we might have made a mistake, too, so the list might shrink
178     as well).
179    
180     Note the presence of C<FATAL> in the list: we do not think that the
181     conditions caught by these warnings are worthy of a warning, we I<insist>
182     that they are worthy of I<stopping> your program, I<instantly>. They are
183     I<bugs>!
184    
185     Therefore we consider C<common::sense> to be much stricter than C<use
186     warnings>, which is good if you are into strict things (we are not,
187     actually, but these things tend to be subjective).
188    
189     After deciding on the list, we ran the module against all of our code that
190     uses C<common::sense> (that is almost all of our code), and found only one
191     occurrence where one of them caused a problem: one of elmex's (unreleased)
192     modules contained:
193    
194     $fmt =~ s/([^\s\[]*)\[( [^\]]* )\]/\x0$1\x1$2\x0/xgo;
195    
196     We quickly agreed that indeed the code should be changed, even though it
197     happened to do the right thing when the warning was switched off.
198    
199    
200     =item much reduced typing
201    
202     Especially with version 2.0 of common::sense, the amount of boilerplate
203     code you need to add to get I<this> policy is daunting. Nobody would write
204     this out in throwaway scripts, commandline hacks or in quick internal-use
205     scripts.
206    
207     By using common::sense you get a defined set of policies (ours, but maybe
208     yours, too, if you accept them), and they are easy to apply to your
209     scripts: typing C<use common::sense;> is even shorter than C<use warnings;
210     use strict; use feature ...>.
211    
212     And you can immediately use the features of your installed perl, which
213     is more difficult in code you release, but not usually an issue for
214     internal-use code (downgrades of your production perl should be rare,
215     right?).
216    
217    
218     =item mucho reduced memory usage
219    
220     Just using all those pragmas mentioned in the SYNOPSIS together wastes
221     <blink>I<< B<776> kilobytes >></blink> of precious memory in my perl, for
222     I<every single perl process using our code>, which on our machines, is a
223     lot. In comparison, this module only uses I<< B<four> >> kilobytes (I even
224     had to write it out so it looks like more) of memory on the same platform.
225    
226     The money/time/effort/electricity invested in these gigabytes (probably
227     petabytes globally!) of wasted memory could easily save 42 trees, and a
228     kitten!
229    
230     Unfortunately, until everybody applies more common sense, there will still
231     often be modules that pull in the monster pragmas. But one can hope...
232    
233     =back
234    
235     =head1 THERE IS NO 'no common::sense'!!!! !!!! !!
236    
237     This module doesn't offer an unimport. First of all, it wastes even more
238     memory, second, and more importantly, who with even a bit of common sense
239     would want no common sense?
240    
241     =head1 STABILITY AND FUTURE VERSIONS
242    
243     Future versions might change just about everything in this module. We
244     might test our modules and upload new ones working with newer versions of
245     this module, and leave you standing in the rain because we didn't tell
246     you. In fact, we did so when switching from 1.0 to 2.0, which enabled gobs
247     of warnings, and made them FATAL on top.
248    
249     Maybe we will load some nifty modules that try to emulate C<say> or so
250     with perls older than 5.10 (this module, of course, should work with older
251     perl versions - supporting 5.8 for example is just common sense at this
252     time. Maybe not in the future, but of course you can trust our common
253     sense to be consistent with, uhm, our opinion).
254    
255     =head1 WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAD TO SAY ABOUT THIS MODULE
256    
257     apeiron
258    
259     "... wow"
260     "I hope common::sense is a joke."
261    
262     crab
263    
264     "i wonder how it would be if joerg schilling wrote perl modules."
265    
266     Adam Kennedy
267    
268     "Very interesting, efficient, and potentially something I'd use all the time."
269     [...]
270     "So no common::sense for me, alas."
271    
272     H.Merijn Brand
273    
274     "Just one more reason to drop JSON::XS from my distribution list"
275    
276     Pista Palo
277    
278     "Something in short supply these days..."
279    
280     Steffen Schwigon
281    
282     "This module is quite for sure *not* just a repetition of all the other
283     'use strict, use warnings'-approaches, and it's also not the opposite.
284     [...] And for its chosen middle-way it's also not the worst name ever.
285     And everything is documented."
286    
287     BKB
288    
289     "[Deleted - thanks to Steffen Schwigon for pointing out this review was
290     in error.]"
291    
292     Somni
293    
294     "the arrogance of the guy"
295     "I swear he tacked somenoe else's name onto the module
296     just so he could use the royal 'we' in the documentation"
297    
298     Anonymous Monk
299    
300     "You just gotta love this thing, its got META.json!!!"
301    
302     dngor
303    
304     "Heh. '"<elmex at ta-sa.org>"' The quotes are semantic
305     distancing from that e-mail address."
306    
307     Jerad Pierce
308    
309     "Awful name (not a proper pragma), and the SYNOPSIS doesn't tell you
310     anything either. Nor is it clear what features have to do with "common
311     sense" or discipline."
312    
313     acme
314    
315     "THERE IS NO 'no common::sense'!!!! !!!! !!"
316    
317     apeiron (meta-comment about us commenting^Wquoting his comment)
318    
319     "How about quoting this: get a clue, you fucktarded amoeba."
320    
321     quanth
322    
323     "common sense is beautiful, json::xs is fast, Anyevent, EV are fast and
324     furious. I love mlehmannware ;)"
325    
326     apeiron
327    
328     "... it's mlehmann's view of what common sense is. His view of common
329     sense is certainly uncommon, insofar as anyone with a clue disagrees
330     with him."
331    
332     apeiron (another meta-comment)
333    
334     "apeiron wonders if his little informant is here to steal more quotes"
335    
336     ew73
337    
338     "... I never got past the SYNOPSIS before calling it shit."
339     [...]
340     How come no one ever quotes me. :("
341    
342     chip (not willing to explain his cryptic questions about links in Changes files)
343    
344     "I'm willing to ask the question I've asked. I'm not willing to go
345     through the whole dance you apparently have choreographed. Either
346     answer the completely obvious question, or tell me to fuck off again."
347    
348     =head1 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
349    
350     Or frequently-come-up confusions.
351    
352     =over 4
353    
354     =item Is this module meant to be serious?
355    
356     Yes, we would have put it under the C<Acme::> namespace otherwise.
357    
358     =item But the manpage is written in a funny/stupid/... way?
359    
360     This was meant to make it clear that our common sense is a subjective
361     thing and other people can use their own notions, taking the steam out
362     of anybody who might be offended (as some people are always offended no
363     matter what you do).
364    
365     This was a failure.
366    
367     But we hope the manpage still is somewhat entertaining even though it
368     explains boring rationale.
369    
370     =item Why do you impose your conventions on my code?
371    
372     For some reason people keep thinking that C<common::sense> imposes
373     process-wide limits, even though the SYNOPSIS makes it clear that it works
374     like other similar modules - i.e. only within the scope that C<use>s them.
375    
376     So, no, we don't - nobody is forced to use this module, and using a module
377     that relies on common::sense does not impose anything on you.
378    
379     =item Why do you think only your notion of common::sense is valid?
380    
381     Well, we don't, and have clearly written this in the documentation to
382     every single release. We were just faster than anybody else w.r.t. to
383     grabbing the namespace.
384    
385     =item But everybody knows that you have to use strict and use warnings,
386     why do you disable them?
387    
388     Well, we don't do this either - we selectively disagree with the
389     usefulness of some warnings over others. This module is aimed at
390     experienced Perl programmers, not people migrating from other languages
391     who might be surprised about stuff such as C<undef>. On the other hand,
392     this does not exclude the usefulness of this module for total newbies, due
393     to its strictness in enforcing policy, while at the same time not limiting
394     the expressive power of perl.
395    
396     This module is considerably I<more> strict than the canonical C<use
397     strict; use warnings>, as it makes all its warnings fatal in nature, so
398     you can not get away with as many things as with the canonical approach.
399    
400     This was not implemented in version 1.0 because of the daunting number
401     of warning categories and the difficulty in getting exactly the set of
402     warnings you wish (i.e. look at the SYNOPSIS in how complicated it is to
403     get a specific set of warnings - it is not reasonable to put this into
404     every module, the maintenance effort would be enormous).
405    
406     =item But many modules C<use strict> or C<use warnings>, so the memory
407     savings do not apply?
408    
409     I suddenly feel sad...
410    
411     But yes, that's true. Fortunately C<common::sense> still uses only a
412     miniscule amount of RAM.
413    
414     =item But it adds another dependency to your modules!
415    
416     It's a fact, yeah. But it's trivial to install, most popular modules have
417     many more dependencies and we consider dependencies a good thing - it
418     leads to better APIs, more thought about interworking of modules and so
419     on.
420    
421     =item Why do you use JSON and not YAML for your META.yml?
422    
423     This is not true - YAML supports a large subset of JSON, and this subset
424     is what META.yml is written in, so it would be correct to say "the
425     META.yml is written in a common subset of YAML and JSON".
426    
427     The META.yml follows the YAML, JSON and META.yml specifications, and is
428     correctly parsed by CPAN, so if you have trouble with it, the problem is
429     likely on your side.
430    
431     =item But! But!
432    
433     Yeah, we know.
434    
435     =back
436    
437     =head1 AUTHOR
438    
439     Marc Lehmann <schmorp@schmorp.de>
440     http://home.schmorp.de/
441    
442     Robin Redeker, "<elmex at ta-sa.org>".
443    
444     =cut
445