Re: Win32::TieRegistry or Perl problem (?)]

[Sam Vilain]

Ken Williams wrote:
On Mar 2, 2005, at 5:53 PM, Linda W wrote:
I'm not sure what perl does with invalid
character data in a variable when you try to manipulate
it by appending it to another value.

There's no such thing as invalid character data in Perl strings.  Perl 
strings can contain arbitrary binary data.
Sure, in the "C" locale.
Outside of that, all bets are off.  You could quite easily have arbitrary
binary data in a Perl scalar that isn't valid character data in UTF-8,
for instance.
Sam.

Re: Win32::TieRegistry or Perl problem (?)]

[Ken Williams]

On Mar 7, 2005, at 3:40 PM, Sam Vilain wrote:
Ken Williams wrote:
On Mar 2, 2005, at 5:53 PM, Linda W wrote:
I'm not sure what perl does with invalid
character data in a variable when you try to manipulate
it by appending it to another value.
There's no such thing as invalid character data in Perl strings.  
Perl strings can contain arbitrary binary data.
Sure, in the "C" locale.
Outside of that, all bets are off.  You could quite easily have 
arbitrary
binary data in a Perl scalar that isn't valid character data in UTF-8,
for instance.
Oh, I see.  Right.
 -Ken

Re: Win32::TieRegistry or Perl problem (?)]

[Austin Schutz]

On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 10:40:30AM +1300, Sam Vilain wrote:
> Ken Williams wrote:
> >
> >On Mar 2, 2005, at 5:53 PM, Linda W wrote:
> >
> >>I'm not sure what perl does with invalid
> >>character data in a variable when you try to manipulate
> >>it by appending it to another value.
> >
> >
> >There's no such thing as invalid character data in Perl strings.  Perl 
> >strings can contain arbitrary binary data.
> 
> Sure, in the "C" locale.
> 
> Outside of that, all bets are off.  You could quite easily have arbitrary
> binary data in a Perl scalar that isn't valid character data in UTF-8,
> for instance.
> 
> Sam.

..but that has nothing to do with how perl operates on scalars.
Perl will gladly append anything to anything. Whether or not that pops out
correctly or not in your favorite encoding has no effect on the perl
behavior. That was the gist of the original question, as I read it.
If you are using some sort of encoding module you should check the
documentation for the module to see what it does with invalid data, as there
is no such thing natively.


Austin

what namespace for future new module ?

[Cédric Bouvier]

Hello there (and sorry for those of you who already read this on another list).

I once had to organize the stress testing of a web based application.
The client wanted to know whether the server would handle a given number
of concurrent sessions and how long would the users have to wait in
front of their stalled browser if such a situation ever happened.

The app was hosted on a big server, and I only had an aging laptop to
bombard it with requests. My machine would have been lying panting on
the floor before the server even noticed something was happening. So I
figured I would run the tests concurrently from several aging laptops at
once, but I didn't want to run between each test machines to try and hit
'return' on all of them within an acceptable timeframe. So I tried to
find some software that would help me manage these test scripts
running on different machines.

I could only find The Grinder in the free software realm, but that means
Javaâ, and scripting the tests in Python. I could not find anything in
Perl. And I find The Grinder not flexible enough to my taste.

I started off writing a Perl Module to achieve this. It runs a server on
one machine, and a number of clients on several other machines. The
server beats the rythm, telling the client when to start their tests, or
when to wait for the other test machines to complete theirs. The server
gathers the results at the end of the test session for later reporting. The
tests themselves are run only by the client machines, and might involve
WWW::Mechanize in my particular case, but any other thing will do.

I have something almost working right now. I'd like to upload it to CPAN (after
I have at least improved the documentation kindly written by Module::Starter,
that is) but I'd like your enlightened opinion on what name it should bear. I
first thought of Test::Distributed, but the perl-qa folks do not agree as it is
not related to Test::More.

I was then suggested (still by the fine people in perl-qa) to choose some name
under Parallel::. To me, Parallel would mean to run different programs at the
same time, probably on the same computer, while my module would allow to run
the same program on different computers. Still, Parallel:: is so far the best I
can think of. Parallel::Distributed, Parallel::Distributor, Parallel::Remote,
Parallel::GoRemote ?

Any comments, suggestions, or questions ?

TIA


-- 
C Ã d r i c   B o u v i e r