Devel::LeakTrace

[Andy Armstrong]

I started looking at Devel::LeakTrace[1] a couple of days ago. It  
wouldn't easily build on my Mac because it needs glib (it uses glib  
hashes internally) so I chucked it on a Linux box and - while it  
seems to do what is says on the tin - it makes any non-trivial script  
run like a dog.

So I decided to see if I could fix it. I replaced its dependency on  
the glib hash with a standalone hash implementation I'd written for  
another project, got it working correctly (I think - the tests are  
broken too...) and started investigating the performance problems. To  
cut a long story short the currently implementation is roughly O(N^2)  
with all that implies...

Anyway, now I'm this far in I might as well fix it properly - but  
that's basically going to mean a complete re-write - to be blunt it's  
not a large module and most of it is currently wrong :)

I mailed the author, Richard Clamp, a couple of days ago but have had  
no reply. If I can't get hold of him by the time I have a release  
ready what should I do? I could release it as a different module -  
but that seems to be a needless pollution of module namespace. What's  
the protocol for replacing a module which - although it sort of works  
- is unusable in most practical situations?

[1] http://search.cpan.org/~rclamp/Devel-LeakTrace-0.05

-- 
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net