Monni wrote on May 11^th, 2016 at 6:27pm:


Yeah, but the file not being there is guaranteed to throw a 'readline() on closed file handle' error. I figure the file being empty is a slightly different issue.

It's just going to take some time to wade through all these.

Edited:

I am in the process of going through 2.6.12. in ActivePerl 2.22.1 with the -w set in YaBB.pl

I've found some missing  Language items, more than 1 bad logical operator, a lot of items than actually need to be initialized to 0, at least 2 places where there's no check or fall back if a file doesn't exist. (And forcing the 'ignore uninitialized variables' is a given.)

Dandello wrote on May 9^th, 2016 at 5:42pm:


I shouldn't complain... I charge 200 EUR/h for fixing people's forums

Dandello wrote on May 9^th, 2016 at 4:06pm:


I really don't bother reading any ChangeLogs as long as things just work... Most online FAQs about Perl have conflicting information that pretty much assumes people never use "perl -w" to see if their code actually works as expected... The main problem with anything regarding Perl is implicit cast and how people use it to avoid error checking... readline returns undef on error, so it should be enclosed in defined() always... also chomp should be the first statement after while-push loop so it can scan the whole array and strip linefeeds and empty items. the next thing is that arrays are never in scalar context, so checking array size by implicit cast does not work as expected. Always have to use "scalar @array" or "$#array + 1" to check array size. "$." returns number of records/items read from file before chomp but after while-push loop, but not after chomp. If you try to chomp too late, you will end up passing single linefeed character to chomp and it will return empty string, which is in most cases not what you wanted.

Dandello wrote on May 9^th, 2016 at 3:17pm:


Well... The server admin already admitted they f*cked up the Perl upgrade... Obviously they did upgrade the primary Perl version from 5.8 to 5.10, but they also installed Perl 5.22 as separate installation aside the existing separate installation of 5.14. YaBB didn't work for me with Perl 5.8 so I was using the Cpanel-installed 5.14 until it stopped working... Then I downgraded to 5.10, because it did start loading the forum, but got lots of croaks... With 5.22 I haven't had even a single croak yet after I fixed the @INC issue. I had to reset some user files in cgi-bin/yabb2/Members because all the croaking did truncate them. As far as I can tell, I've posted all the changes that made the forum behave with Perl 5.22 as it used to behave with 5.14 before all hell did freeze over due to the upgrade failing.

Dandello wrote on May 9^th, 2016 at 2:03pm:


In the example I updated on the previous post, the second variable is always undefined, because when you assign a value, it can't decide which variable the user means. As usually the warning is supressed without running "perl -w" and is silently ignored as the second variable is implicitly equal to empty string. At least on the version I used, Perl is case insensitive, but case preserving... So the first variable name gets used even if you explicitly try to declare second variable with similar name but differing in capitalization.

Dandello wrote on May 9^th, 2016 at 1:22pm:


Using $px instead of "px" is just overkill... Not to mention variable names with anything else than 0-9,a-z,A-Z are discouraged, also variables $a and $b are reserved for internal use... I also noticed in one of the files, there is two variables that differ only in letter capitalization even though Perl is inherently case insensitive when it comes to variable names.

There is both $nextMessid and $nextMessId in InstantMessage.pm...