perl5142delta(1)

1PERL5142DELTA(1)       Perl Programmers Reference Guide       PERL5142DELTA(1)
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NAME

6       perl5142delta - what is new for perl v5.14.2
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DESCRIPTION

9       This document describes differences between the 5.14.1 release and the
10       5.14.2 release.
11
12       If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.14.0, first read
13       perl5141delta, which describes differences between 5.14.0 and 5.14.1.
14

Core Enhancements

16       No changes since 5.14.0.
17

Security

19   "File::Glob::bsd_glob()" memory error with GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC (CVE-2011-2728).
20       Calling "File::Glob::bsd_glob" with the unsupported flag
21       GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC would cause an access violation / segfault.  A Perl
22       program that accepts a flags value from an external source could expose
23       itself to denial of service or arbitrary code execution attacks.  There
24       are no known exploits in the wild.  The problem has been corrected by
25       explicitly disabling all unsupported flags and setting unused function
26       pointers to null.  Bug reported by Clement Lecigne.
27
28   "Encode" decode_xs n-byte heap-overflow (CVE-2011-2939)
29       A bug in "Encode" could, on certain inputs, cause the heap to overflow.
30       This problem has been corrected.  Bug reported by Robert Zacek.
31

Incompatible Changes

33       There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.14.0. If any
34       exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.
35

Deprecations

37       There have been no deprecations since 5.14.0.
38

Modules and Pragmata

40   New Modules and Pragmata
41       None
42
43   Updated Modules and Pragmata
44       •   CPAN has been upgraded from version 1.9600 to version 1.9600_01.
45
46           CPAN::Distribution has been upgraded from version 1.9602 to
47           1.9602_01.
48
49           Backported bugfixes from CPAN version 1.9800.  Ensures proper
50           detection of "configure_requires" prerequisites from CPAN Meta
51           files in the case where "dynamic_config" is true.  [rt.cpan.org
52           #68835]
53
54           Also ensures that "configure_requires" is only checked in META
55           files, not MYMETA files, so protect against MYMETA generation that
56           drops "configure_requires".
57
58       •   Encode has been upgraded from version 2.42 to 2.42_01.
59
60           See "Security".
61
62       •   File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.12 to version 1.13.
63
64           See "Security".
65
66       •   PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from version 0.11 to 0.11_01.
67
68           It fixes a problem with "open my $fh, ">", \$scalar" not working if
69           $scalar is a copy-on-write scalar.
70
71   Removed Modules and Pragmata
72       None
73

Platform Support

75   New Platforms
76       None
77
78   Discontinued Platforms
79       None
80
81   Platform-Specific Notes
82       HP-UX PA-RISC/64 now supports gcc-4.x
83           A fix to correct the socketsize now makes the test suite pass on
84           HP-UX PA-RISC for 64bitall builds.
85
86       Building on OS X 10.7 Lion and Xcode 4 works again
87           The build system has been updated to work with the build tools
88           under Mac OS X 10.7.
89

Bug Fixes

91       •   In @INC filters (subroutines returned by subroutines in @INC), $_
92           used to misbehave: If returned from a subroutine, it would not be
93           copied, but the variable itself would be returned; and freeing $_
94           (e.g., with "undef *_") would cause perl to crash.  This has been
95           fixed [perl #91880].
96
97       •   Perl 5.10.0 introduced some faulty logic that made "U*" in the
98           middle of a pack template equivalent to "U0" if the input string
99           was empty.  This has been fixed [perl #90160].
100
101       •   "caller" no longer leaks memory when called from the DB package if
102           @DB::args was assigned to after the first call to "caller".  Carp
103           was triggering this bug [perl #97010].
104
105       •   "utf8::decode" had a nasty bug that would modify copy-on-write
106           scalars' string buffers in place (i.e., skipping the copy).  This
107           could result in hashes having two elements with the same key [perl
108           #91834].
109
110       •   Localising a tied variable used to make it read-only if it
111           contained a copy-on-write string.
112
113       •   Elements of restricted hashes (see the fields pragma) containing
114           copy-on-write values couldn't be deleted, nor could such hashes be
115           cleared ("%hash = ()").
116
117       •   Locking a hash element that is a glob copy no longer causes
118           subsequent assignment to it to corrupt the glob.
119
120       •   A panic involving the combination of the regular expression
121           modifiers "/aa" introduced in 5.14.0 and the "\b" escape sequence
122           has been fixed [perl #95964].
123

Known Problems

125       This is a list of some significant unfixed bugs, which are regressions
126       from 5.12.0.
127
128       •   "PERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT" is broken.
129
130           Since perl 5.14.0, building with "-DPERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT" hasn't been
131           possible. This means that perl currently doesn't work on any
132           platforms that require it to be built this way, including Symbian.
133
134           While "PERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT" now works again on recent development
135           versions of perl, it actually working on Symbian again hasn't been
136           verified.
137
138           We'd be very interested in hearing from anyone working with Perl on
139           Symbian.
140

Acknowledgements

142       Perl 5.14.2 represents approximately three months of development since
143       Perl 5.14.1 and contains approximately 1200 lines of changes across 61
144       files from 9 authors.
145
146       Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
147       community of users and developers.  The following people are known to
148       have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.14.2:
149
150       Craig A. Berry, David Golden, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz,
151       H.Merijn Brand, Karl Williamson, Nicholas Clark, Pau Amma and Ricardo
152       Signes.
153

Reporting Bugs

155       If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
156       recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
157       database at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ .  There may also be
158       information at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.
159
160       If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
161       program included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a
162       tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output
163       of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
164       the Perl porting team.
165
166       If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it
167       inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please
168       send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed
169       subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core
170       committers, who be able to help assess the impact of issues, figure out
171       a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate
172       or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is supported.
173       Please only use this address for security issues in the Perl core, not
174       for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
175