Skip Menu |

Preferred bug tracker

Please visit the preferred bug tracker to report your issue.

This queue is for tickets about the Data-Printer CPAN distribution.

Report information
The Basics
Id: 79731
Status: rejected
Priority: 0/
Queue: Data-Printer
People
Owner: Nobody in particular
Requestors: colink [...] perlDreamer.com
Cc:
AdminCc:
Bug Information
Severity: Important
Broken in: 0.33
Fixed in: (no value)
Attachments
trial

History Show all quoted text
  Tue Sep 18 16:43:42 2012 colink [...] perlDreamer.com - Ticket created
Subject: Data::Printer breaks cloning variables via Clone
Data::Printer is an awesome and very helpful module, but I found the hard way that using it seems to alter my data so that Clone cannot create copies of scalar references. This bug is a duplicate of the bug that I filed for Clone, since Data::Printer should not be touching/altering the data that it prints, and I'd like Clone to be able to handle as many edge cases as possible.
Subject: trial
Download trial
application/octet-stream 511b

Message body not shown because it is not plain text.

  Tue Sep 25 01:26:15 2012 garu [...] cpan.org - Correspondence added
On Tue Sep 18 16:43:42 2012, colink@perlDreamer.com wrote: Show quoted text
> Data::Printer is an awesome and very helpful module, but I found the hard > way that using it seems to alter my data so that Clone cannot create > copies of scalar references. > > This bug is a duplicate of the bug that I filed for Clone, since > Data::Printer should not be touching/altering the data that it prints, > and I'd like Clone to be able to handle as many edge cases as possible.
Hi there! Thanks for the bug report and the test case :) As discussed in the Clone ticket, the data itself is not changed, but due to some mangling and peeking, Perl's internal representation of the data changes - and quite a bit while at it :( I guess this can be split in two issues: 1) why is Data::Printer changing the variable's internal representation; 2) why is Clone not able to clone that particular representation. Let's stick to (1) in this ticket, and leave (2) for the one in Clone's tracker.
  Tue Sep 25 01:26:18 2012 The RT System itself - Status changed from 'new' to 'open'
  Tue Sep 25 01:28:59 2012 garu [...] cpan.org - Correspondence added

Message body is not shown because it is too large.

  Sun Oct 07 01:59:51 2012 garu [...] cpan.org - Correspondence added
Ok, it doesn't seem to be a bug in Data::Printer. Perl does not guarantee the internal representation of a variable is immutable during its life span, and Data::Printer of course doesn't write to your variable. However, Hash::Util::FieldHash's fieldhash(), used to keep track of circular references, is changing the variable's internal representation to something Clone's clone() can't process properly. More information is available in http://perldoc.perl.org/Hash/Util/FieldHash.html#How-field-hashes-work. Here's a simple way to reproduce the problem without using DDP: ------------8<------------ use strict; use warnings; use Hash::Util::FieldHash qw(fieldhash); use Clone qw(clone); my $var = {}; fieldhash my %hash; # this line is changing the # internal representation of $var exists $hash{ \$var }; my $cloned = clone($var); die "uh-oh" if $var == $cloned; ------------>8------------ If this turns out to be a bug in Hash::Util::FieldHash (a core module), then I'll change Data::Printer to use Scalar::Util's refaddr or something. But it looks like it's just an issue in Clone. Thanks a lot for letting me know of the issue, though. It's important that Data::Printer works as flawlessly as possible, so feel free to send any potential fixes to this on our end, and/or reopen this ticket if you feel the issue should be handled differently. Cheers!
  Sun Oct 07 01:59:52 2012 garu [...] cpan.org - Status changed from 'open' to 'rejected'