[Setup-tool-hackers] use strict;

[Arturo Espinosa Aldama <arturo ximian com>]

Hi. The problem with Perl complaining about close (undef) was because
boot.pl.in had use strict inside it, but the code itself didn't honour it.
I think that before using strict we should reshape the code so that it
works in a robust way, and that requires understanding what use strict
means.

In my case, I just know a couple of situations where strict changes Perl's
behaviour: mostly annoying stuff, like not allowing you to use undef in
string operations (although undef eq ""), and a couple more like that. So
I would first study what strict does, then decide if I agree with these
policies (which actually change the definition of what Perl is) and
finally audit all my code to check if it complies with strict.

Too bad we didn't take this decisions earlier (perl -w, use strict, etc.),
and now we don't have the time for such a change; a change which would not
bring any visible advantage for the end user, which are the kind of work
we are doing now until the next couple of releases, as I understand. 

Now that I know why Perl had this supposedly erratic behaviour, I think
I'm going to take out xst_file_close, unless somebody finds it of any
use. I think it is a good idea, and it adds some completeness to the
xst_file code, but it is not really necessary.

Greetings,
Arturo


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