Bug #5698: rexml Encoding logic creates unnecessary singleton classes, aliases at runtime

• Status: Rejected
• Assignee: -
• Target version: Ruby 1.8.7
• ruby -v: 1.8.7 head

[headius (Charles Nutter)]

The logic for switching a given parser to a new encoding currently does the following:

• Reopens the Encoding module (only on first use of the encoding)
• Defines two new methods for the encoding being applied (only on first use)
• Singletonizes the parser object and aliases the encoding-specific methods to "encode" and "decode"

This last phase is unnecessary, but happens at runtime whenever an encoding is applied to a parser. The resulting singletonizing and method aliasing causes cache flushes.

I have created a patch that does not use this singleton logic and which will not cause any singletons or method table updates at steady-state.

https://gist.github.com/1420708

I know 1.8.7 is only in security patch mode, but I thought I'd throw this out there. JRuby will probably apply it to our fork of 1.8.7 stdlib.

[headius (Charles Nutter)]

Oops, I realized that also has my baseparser.rb patch. It can be ignored; there's a separate bug for that applied against ruby-trunk. I'd love to see that backported to 1.8.7, but it's not related to this bug.

[headius (Charles Nutter)]

This should be fixed if 1.8 is still open, or closed if it is not.

[kou (Kouhei Sutou)]

• Status changed from Open to Rejected

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2011/10/06/plans-for-1-8-7/ says "We continue to provide normal maintenance for 1.8.7 as usual, until June 2012. ... After that we stop bugfixes.". Now, "after June 2012" is true. So I close this.