1PERL5203DELTA(1)       Perl Programmers Reference Guide       PERL5203DELTA(1)
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NAME

6       perl5203delta - what is new for perl v5.20.3
7

DESCRIPTION

9       This document describes differences between the 5.20.2 release and the
10       5.20.3 release.
11
12       If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.20.1, first read
13       perl5202delta, which describes differences between 5.20.1 and 5.20.2.
14

Incompatible Changes

16       There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.20.2.  If any
17       exist, they are bugs, and we request that you submit a report.  See
18       "Reporting Bugs" below.
19

Modules and Pragmata

21   Updated Modules and Pragmata
22       •   Errno has been upgraded from version 1.20_05 to 1.20_06.
23
24           Add -P to the pre-processor command-line on GCC 5.  GCC added extra
25           line directives, breaking parsing of error code definitions.  [GH
26           #14491] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14491>
27
28       •   Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20150214 to
29           5.20150822.
30
31           Updated to cover the latest releases of Perl.
32
33       •   perl5db.pl has been upgraded from 1.44 to 1.44_01.
34
35           The debugger would cause an assertion failure.  [GH #14605]
36           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14605>
37

Documentation

39   Changes to Existing Documentation
40       perlfunc
41
42       •   Mention that study() is currently a no-op.
43
44       perlguts
45
46       •   The OOK example has been updated to account for COW changes and a
47           change in the storage of the offset.
48
49       perlhacktips
50
51       •   Documentation has been added illustrating the perils of assuming
52           the contents of static memory pointed to by the return values of
53           Perl wrappers for C library functions doesn't change.
54
55       perlpodspec
56
57       •   The specification of the POD language is changing so that the
58           default encoding of PODs that aren't in UTF-8 (unless otherwise
59           indicated) is CP1252 instead of ISO-8859-1 (Latin1).
60

Utility Changes

62   h2ph
63h2ph now handles hexadecimal constants in the compiler's predefined
64           macro definitions, as visible in $Config{cppsymbols}.  [GH #14491]
65           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14491>
66

Testing

68t/perf/taint.t has been added to see if optimisations with taint
69           issues are keeping things fast.
70
71t/porting/re_context.t has been added to test that utf8 and its
72           dependencies only use the subset of the "$1..$n" capture vars that
73           Perl_save_re_context() is hard-coded to localize, because that
74           function has no efficient way of determining at runtime what vars
75           to localize.
76

Platform Support

78   Platform-Specific Notes
79       Win32
80           •   Previously, when compiling with a 64-bit Visual C++, every Perl
81               XS module (including CPAN ones) and Perl aware C file would
82               unconditionally have around a dozen warnings from hv_func.h.
83               These warnings have been silenced.  GCC (all bitness) and
84               32-bit Visual C++ were not affected.
85
86miniperl.exe is now built with -fno-strict-aliasing, allowing
87               64-bit builds to complete with GCC 4.8.  [GH #14556]
88               <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14556>
89

Selected Bug Fixes

91       •   Repeated global pattern matches in scalar context on large tainted
92           strings were exponentially slow depending on the current match
93           position in the string.  [GH #14238]
94           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14238>
95
96       •   The original visible value of $/ is now preserved when it is set to
97           an invalid value.  Previously if you set $/ to a reference to an
98           array, for example, perl would produce a runtime error and not set
99           PL_rs, but Perl code that checked $/ would see the array reference.
100           [GH #14245] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14245>
101
102       •   Perl 5.14.0 introduced a bug whereby "eval { LABEL: }" would crash.
103           This has been fixed.  [GH #14438]
104           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14438>
105
106       •   Extending an array cloned from a parent thread could result in
107           "Modification of a read-only value attempted" errors when
108           attempting to modify the new elements.  [GH #14605]
109           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14605>
110
111       •   Several cases of data used to store environment variable contents
112           in core C code being potentially overwritten before being used have
113           been fixed.  [GH #14476]
114           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14476>
115
116       •   UTF-8 variable names used in array indexes, unquoted UTF-8 HERE-
117           document terminators and UTF-8 function names all now work
118           correctly.  [GH #14601]
119           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14601>
120
121       •   A subtle bug introduced in Perl 5.20.2 involving UTF-8 in regular
122           expressions and sometimes causing a crash has been fixed.  A new
123           test script has been added to test this fix; see under "Testing".
124           [GH #14600] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14600>
125
126       •   Some patterns starting with "/.*..../" matched against long strings
127           have been slow since Perl 5.8, and some of the form "/.*..../i"
128           have been slow since Perl 5.18.  They are now all fast again.  [GH
129           #14475] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14475>
130
131       •   Warning fatality is now ignored when rewinding the stack.  This
132           prevents infinite recursion when the now fatal error also causes
133           rewinding of the stack.  [GH #14319]
134           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14319>
135
136       •   setpgrp($nonzero) (with one argument) was accidentally changed in
137           Perl 5.16 to mean setpgrp(0).  This has been fixed.
138
139       •   A crash with "%::=(); J->${\"::"}" has been fixed.  [GH #14790]
140           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14790>
141
142       •   Regular expression possessive quantifier Perl 5.20 regression now
143           fixed.  "qr/"PAT"{"min,max"}+""/" is supposed to behave identically
144           to "qr/(?>"PAT"{"min,max"})/".  Since Perl 5.20, this didn't work
145           if min and max were equal.  [GH #14857]
146           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14857>
147
148       •   Code like "/$a[/" used to read the next line of input and treat it
149           as though it came immediately after the opening bracket.  Some
150           invalid code consequently would parse and run, but some code caused
151           crashes, so this is now disallowed.  [GH #14462]
152           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14462>
153

Acknowledgements

155       Perl 5.20.3 represents approximately 7 months of development since Perl
156       5.20.2 and contains approximately 3,200 lines of changes across 99
157       files from 26 authors.
158
159       Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
160       were approximately 1,500 lines of changes to 43 .pm, .t, .c and .h
161       files.
162
163       Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
164       community of users and developers.  The following people are known to
165       have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.20.3:
166
167       Alex Vandiver, Andy Dougherty, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Chris 'BinGOs'
168       Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Daniel Dragan,
169       David Mitchell, Father Chrysostomos, H.Merijn Brand, James E Keenan,
170       James McCoy, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, kmx,
171       Lajos Veres, Lukas Mai, Matthew Horsfall, Petr Písař, Randy Stauner,
172       Ricardo Signes, Sawyer X, Steve Hay, Tony Cook, Yves Orton.
173
174       The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
175       generated from version control history.  In particular, it does not
176       include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
177       reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.
178
179       Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN
180       modules included in Perl's core.  We're grateful to the entire CPAN
181       community for helping Perl to flourish.
182
183       For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,
184       please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.
185

Reporting Bugs

187       If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
188       recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
189       database at https://rt.perl.org/ .  There may also be information at
190       http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.
191
192       If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
193       program included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a
194       tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output
195       of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
196       the Perl porting team.
197
198       If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it
199       inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please
200       send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org.  This points to a closed
201       subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core
202       committers, who will be able to help assess the impact of issues,
203       figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to
204       mitigate or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is
205       supported.  Please only use this address for security issues in the
206       Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
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SEE ALSO

209       The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details
210       on what changed.
211
212       The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
213
214       The README file for general stuff.
215
216       The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
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220perl v5.38.2                      2023-11-30                  PERL5203DELTA(1)
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