AnyEvent 7 coming soon, care to test it?

[Marc Lehmann]

Hi!

AnyEvent 7 is coming soon to a cpan mirror near you.

It's main feature (that resulted in a major version bump) is AnyEvent::IO,
which exports functions to open, read, unlink etc. files and directories,
more or less every filesystem operation perl has built-ins for.

The advantage of going via AnyEvent::IO is that it will be asynchronous, if
IO::AIO is available. If it's not, it will fall back to a comparatively lean
pure-perl implementation that simply calls the perl built-in function in
most cases.

The rationale for having Anyevent::IO is that AnyEvent has a few areas
where it does I/O itself (for example, for loading /etc/hosts or for
logging), and these things could not be used in some types of programs
that need to maintain low latencies.

Now they can, and if you care about these things, now you can do so as wlel
in your modules.

The following areas of AnyEvent itself use it:

- loading of /etc/hosts (which will be re-checked on each access too instead
  of loading it only once at program startup).
- loading of /etc/resolv.conf in Anyevent::DNS.
- logging to disk via AnyEvent::Log (e.g. AE_LOG=log=file=/tmp/mylog.txt).

The code for these is rather complicated (I wish I could depend on Coro for
these, it would simplify things considerably :), and it would be nice if
somebody could gave them a tets, or simply try to install cirrent
CVS-AnyEvent and see that it still works.

To get a current copy, you need to:

   cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous at cvs.schmorp.de/schmorpforge co AnyEvent
   cd AnyEvent
   perl Makefile.PL
   make test
   make install

If it works, I would be thankful for a notice. If it doesn't work even
more so :)

Thanks!

The important Changes so far include:

        - child watchers are broken in POE 1.352 (also many earlier
          versions) and there seems to be no way to work around it, as POE
          itself is inherently racy. Document this regression and add a delay
          second in t/68_poe_03_child.t for the time being.
        - new module AnyEvent::IO, that is a frontend to either a pure-perl
          synchronous I/O implementation (AnyEvent::IO::Perl), or to the
          asynchronous I/O extension IO::AIO (AnyEvent::IO::IOAIO).
        - load /etc/hosts only when dns has no answer.
        - stat /etc/hosts on every access and reload it if it changed.
        - load /etc/hosts via AnyEvent::IO - potentially asynchronous.
        - AnyEvent::Log log_to_file and log_to_path now use AnyEvent::IO. As
          a side effect, they now use true appending as opposed to libc
          appending, and the file might not have been opened when the function
          returns.
        - the default logging level was not properly documented in a variety of
          places, this has hopefully been rectified.
        - updated uts46data.pl for unicode 6.1.0.
        - made log messages genearted by AnyEvent submodules not
          include the package name anymore, as it will be logged
          by default already.
        - upgrade to the trick used by common-sense 3.5 to work
          around extra warning torture/breakage under perl 5.15.x.
        - log messages by anyevent are now ucfirst, are usually full
          sentences and do no longer include the package name.
        - the storable read type would sometimes throw an exception instead
          of causing EBADMSG (analyzed by Maxime Soulé).
        - work around a bug in openssl 1.0.1 which enforces a minimum rsa
          keysize (reported by Paul Howarth).

-- 
                The choice of a       Deliantra, the free code+content MORPG
      -----==-     _GNU_              http://www.deliantra.net
      ----==-- _       generation
      ---==---(_)__  __ ____  __      Marc Lehmann
      --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ /      schmorp at schmorp.de
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