perl5121delta(1)

1PERL5121DELTA(1)       Perl Programmers Reference Guide       PERL5121DELTA(1)
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NAME

6       perldelta - what is new for perl v5.12.1
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DESCRIPTION

9       This document describes differences between the 5.12.0 release and the
10       5.12.1 release.
11
12       If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.10.1, first read
13       perl5120delta, which describes differences between 5.10.1 and 5.12.0.
14

Incompatible Changes

16       There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.0. If any
17       incompatibilities with 5.12.0 exist, they are bugs. Please report them.
18

Core Enhancements

20       Other than the bug fixes listed below, there should be no user-visible
21       changes to the core language in this release.
22

Modules and Pragmata

24   Pragmata Changes
25       ·   We fixed exporting of "is_strict" and "is_lax" from version.
26
27           These were being exported with a wrapper that treated them as
28           method calls, which caused them to fail.  They are just functions,
29           are documented as such, and should never be subclassed, so this
30           patch just exports them directly as functions without the wrapper.
31
32   Updated Modules
33       ·   We upgraded CGI.pm to version 3.49 to incorporate fixes for
34           regressions introduced in the release we shipped with Perl 5.12.0.
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36       ·   We upgraded Pod::Simple to version 3.14 to get an improvement to
37           \C\<\< \>\> parsing.
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39       ·   We made a small fix to the CPANPLUS test suite to fix an occasional
40           spurious test failure.
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42       ·   We upgraded Safe to version 2.27 to wrap coderefs retured by
43           "reval()" and "rdo()".
44

Changes to Existing Documentation

46       ·   We added the new maintenance release policy to perlpolicy.pod
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48       ·   We've clarified the multiple-angle-bracket construct in the spec
49           for POD in perlpodspec
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51       ·   We added a missing explanation for a warning about ":=" to
52           perldiag.pod
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54       ·   We removed a false claim in perlunitut that all text strings are
55           Unicode strings in Perl.
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57       ·   We updated the Github mirror link in perlrepository to
58           mirrors/perl, not github/perl
59
60       ·   We fixed a a minor error in perl5114delta.pod.
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62       ·   We replaced a mention of the now-obsolete Switch.pm with
63           given/when.
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65       ·   We improved documentation about $sitelibexp/sitecustomize.pl in
66           perlrun.
67
68       ·   We corrected perlmodlib.pod which had unintentionally omitted a
69           number of modules.
70
71       ·   We updated the documentation for 'require' in perlfunc.pod relating
72           to putting Perl code in @INC.
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74       ·   We reinstated some erroneously-removed documentation about
75           quotemeta in perlfunc.
76
77       ·   We fixed an a2p example in perlutil.pod.
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79       ·   We filled in a blank in perlport.pod with the release date of Perl
80           5.12.
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82       ·   We fixed broken links in a number of perldelta files.
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84       ·   The documentation for Carp.pm incorrectly stated that the
85           $Carp::Verbose variable makes cluck generate stack backtraces.
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87       ·   We fixed a number of typos in Pod::Functions
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89       ·   We improved documentation of case-changing functions in
90           perlfunc.pod
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92       ·   We corrected perlgpl.pod to contain the correct version of the GNU
93           General Public License.
94

Testing

96   Testing Improvements
97       ·   t/op/sselect.t is now less prone to clock jitter during timing
98           checks on Windows.
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100           sleep() time on Win32 may be rounded down to multiple of the clock
101           tick interval.
102
103       ·   lib/blib.t and lib/locale.t: Fixes for test failures on Darwin/PPC
104
105       ·   perl5db.t: Fix for test failures when "Term::ReadLine::Gnu" is
106           installed.
107

Installation and Configuration Improvements

109   Configuration improvements
110       ·   We updated INSTALL with notes about how to deal with broken dbm.h
111           on OpenSUSE (and possibly other platforms)
112

Bug Fixes

114       ·   A bug in how we process filetest operations could cause a segfault.
115           Filetests don't always expect an op on the stack, so we now use
116           TOPs only if we're sure that we're not stat'ing the _ filehandle.
117           This is indicated by OPf_KIDS (as checked in ck_ftst).
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119           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74542>
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121       ·   When deparsing a nextstate op that has both a change of package
122           (relative to the previous nextstate) and a label, the package
123           declaration is now emitted first, because it is syntactically
124           impermissible for a label to prefix a package declaration.
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126       ·   XSUB.h now correctly redefines fgets under PERL_IMPLICIT_SYS
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128           See also: <http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=55049>
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130       ·   utf8::is_utf8 now respects GMAGIC (e.g. $1)
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132       ·   XS code using "fputc()" or "fputs()": on Windows could cause an
133           error due to their arguments being swapped.
134
135           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=72704>
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137       ·   We fixed a small bug in lex_stuff_pvn() that caused spurious syntax
138           errors in an obscure situation.  It happened when stuffing was
139           performed on the last line of a file and the line ended with a
140           statement that lacked a terminating semicolon.
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142           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74006>
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144       ·   We fixed a bug that could cause \N{} constructs followed by a
145           single . to be parsed incorrectly.
146
147           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74978>
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149       ·   We fixed a bug that caused when(scalar) without an argument not to
150           be treated as a syntax error.
151
152           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74114>
153
154       ·   We fixed a regression in the handling of labels immediately before
155           string evals that was introduced in Perl 5.12.0.
156
157           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74290>
158
159       ·   We fixed a regression in case-insensitive matching of folded
160           characters in regular expressions introduced in Perl 5.12.0.
161
162           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=72998>
163

Platform Specific Notes

165   HP-UX
166       ·   Perl now allows -Duse64bitint without promoting to use64bitall on
167           HP-UX
168
169   AIX
170       ·   Perl now builds on AIX 4.2
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172           The changes required work around AIX 4.2s' lack of support for
173           IPv6, and limited support for POSIX "sigaction()".
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175   FreeBSD 7
176       ·   FreeBSD 7 no longer contains /usr/bin/objformat. At build time,
177           Perl now skips the objformat check for versions 7 and higher and
178           assumes ELF.
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180   VMS
181       ·   It's now possible to build extensions on older (pre 7.3-2) VMS
182           systems.
183
184           DCL symbol length was limited to 1K up until about seven years or
185           so ago, but there was no particularly deep reason to prevent those
186           older systems from configuring and building Perl.
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188       ·   We fixed the previously-broken "-Uuseperlio" build on VMS.
189
190           We were checking a variable that doesn't exist in the non-default
191           case of disabling perlio.  Now we only look at it when it exists.
192
193       ·   We fixed the -Uuseperlio command-line option in configure.com.
194
195           Formerly it only worked if you went through all the questions
196           interactively and explicitly answered no.
197

Known Problems

199       ·   "List::Util::first" misbehaves in the presence of a lexical $_
200           (typically introduced by "my $_" or implicitly by "given"). The
201           variable which gets set for each iteration is the package variable
202           $_, not the lexical $_.
203
204           A similar issue may occur in other modules that provide functions
205           which take a block as their first argument, like
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207               foo { ... $_ ...} list
208
209           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=67694>
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211       ·   "Module::Load::Conditional" and "version" have an unfortunate
212           interaction which can cause "CPANPLUS" to crash when it encounters
213           an unparseable version string.  Upgrading to "CPANPLUS" 0.9004 or
214           "Module::Load::Conditional" 0.38 from CPAN will resolve this issue.
215

Acknowledgements

217       Perl 5.12.1 represents approximately four weeks of development since
218       Perl 5.12.0 and contains approximately 4,000 lines of changes across
219       142 files from 28 authors.
220
221       Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
222       community of users and developers.  The following people are known to
223       have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.12.1:
224
225       var Arnfjoerd` Bjarmason, Chris Williams, chromatic, Craig A. Berry,
226       David Golden, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Frank Wiegand, Gene
227       Sullivan, Goro Fuji, H.Merijn Brand, James E Keenan, Jan Dubois, Jesse
228       Vincent, Josh ben Jore, Karl Williamson, Leon Brocard, Michael Schwern,
229       Nga Tang Chan, Nicholas Clark, Niko Tyni, Philippe Bruhat, Rafael
230       Garcia-Suarez, Ricardo Signes, Steffen Mueller, Todd Rinaldo, Vincent
231       Pit and Zefram.
232

Reporting Bugs

234       If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
235       recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
236       database at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ .  There may also be
237       information at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.
238
239       If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
240       program included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a
241       tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output
242       of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
243       the Perl porting team.
244
245       If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it
246       inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please
247       send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed
248       subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core
249       committers, who be able to help assess the impact of issues, figure out
250       a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate
251       or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is supported.
252       Please only use this address for security issues in the Perl core, not
253       for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
254