Hi Eric,
Thanks for the new release.
Regarding named references, there were indeed a lot of developments and many issues were discovered. So far, only a few of them have been fixed. In
workers/53799, I have listed patches that fix many more. Bart was the main point of contact for everything related to named references but he signaled that he was currently busy with other matters and could probably not spend time on this before mid-Septembre. It would be great if someone else with commit rights and/or interest in named references could review the patches.
There are more named reference issues and even some design questions, in addition to the issues fixed by the patches listed in
workers/53799. I have done some preliminary work to address some of them. However, I'm reluctant to go much further as most solutions depend on the not yet committed patches. If these end up changing a lot before they are committed, it may require a lot of work to adapt the solutions or may even invalidate some of them.
Instead of fixing more named reference issues, I will instead look at another new feature I'm eagerly awaiting, namely non-forking command substitutions. To me, it looks like a much more straightforward feature than named references. I don't expect to find many issues but since it's also a not completely trivial feature, I wouldn't be surprised to find a few corner cases that don't behave as expected. I will also try to have a look at namespaces, although I expect even less surprises with them.
To track all the known issues, I have created
Test/I01issues.ztst. For now I have added 18 tests, which cover the issues fixed by the patches listed in
workers/53799. All tests fail with 5.9.0.3-test but pass if all the patches are applied.
Philippe