perl5121delta(1)

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

6       perl5121delta - 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 5.10.0 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 to version 3.49 to incorporate fixes for
34           regressions introduced in the release we shipped with Perl 5.12.0.
35
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.
41
42       •   We upgraded Safe to version 2.27 to wrap coderefs returned by
43           "reval()" and "rdo()".
44

Changes to Existing Documentation

46       •   We added the new maintenance release policy to perlpolicy
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48       •   We've clarified the multiple-angle-bracket construct in the spec
49           for POD in perlpodspec
50
51       •   We added a missing explanation for a warning about ":=" to perldiag
52
53       •   We removed a false claim in perlunitut that all text strings are
54           Unicode strings in Perl.
55
56       •   We updated the GitHub mirror link in perlrepository to
57           mirrors/perl, not github/perl
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59       •   We fixed a minor error in perl5114delta.
60
61       •   We replaced a mention of the now-obsolete Switch with given/when.
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63       •   We improved documentation about $sitelibexp/sitecustomize.pl in
64           perlrun.
65
66       •   We corrected perlmodlib which had unintentionally omitted a number
67           of modules.
68
69       •   We updated the documentation for 'require' in perlfunc relating to
70           putting Perl code in @INC.
71
72       •   We reinstated some erroneously-removed documentation about
73           quotemeta in perlfunc.
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75       •   We fixed an a2p example in perlutil.
76
77       •   We filled in a blank in perlport with the release date of Perl
78           5.12.
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80       •   We fixed broken links in a number of perldelta files.
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82       •   The documentation for Carp incorrectly stated that the
83           $Carp::Verbose variable makes cluck generate stack backtraces.
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85       •   We fixed a number of typos in Pod::Functions
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87       •   We improved documentation of case-changing functions in perlfunc
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89       •   We corrected perlgpl to contain the correct version of the GNU
90           General Public License.
91

Testing

93   Testing Improvements
94       •   t/op/sselect.t is now less prone to clock jitter during timing
95           checks on Windows.
96
97           sleep() time on Win32 may be rounded down to multiple of the clock
98           tick interval.
99
100       •   lib/blib.t and lib/locale.t: Fixes for test failures on Darwin/PPC
101
102       •   perl5db.t: Fix for test failures when "Term::ReadLine::Gnu" is
103           installed.
104

Installation and Configuration Improvements

106   Configuration improvements
107       •   We updated INSTALL with notes about how to deal with broken dbm.h
108           on OpenSUSE (and possibly other platforms)
109

Bug Fixes

111       •   A bug in how we process filetest operations could cause a segfault.
112           Filetests don't always expect an op on the stack, so we now use
113           TOPs only if we're sure that we're not stat'ing the _ filehandle.
114           This is indicated by OPf_KIDS (as checked in ck_ftst).
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116           See also: <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/10335>
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118       •   When deparsing a nextstate op that has both a change of package
119           (relative to the previous nextstate) and a label, the package
120           declaration is now emitted first, because it is syntactically
121           impermissible for a label to prefix a package declaration.
122
123       •   XSUB.h now correctly redefines fgets under PERL_IMPLICIT_SYS
124
125           See also: <http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=55049>
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127       •   utf8::is_utf8 now respects GMAGIC (e.g. $1)
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129       •   XS code using "fputc()" or "fputs()": on Windows could cause an
130           error due to their arguments being swapped.
131
132           See also: <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/10156>
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134       •   We fixed a small bug in lex_stuff_pvn() that caused spurious syntax
135           errors in an obscure situation.  It happened when stuffing was
136           performed on the last line of a file and the line ended with a
137           statement that lacked a terminating semicolon.
138
139           See also: <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/10273>
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141       •   We fixed a bug that could cause \N{} constructs followed by a
142           single . to be parsed incorrectly.
143
144           See also: <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/10367>
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146       •   We fixed a bug that caused when(scalar) without an argument not to
147           be treated as a syntax error.
148
149           See also: <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/10287>
150
151       •   We fixed a regression in the handling of labels immediately before
152           string evals that was introduced in Perl 5.12.0.
153
154           See also: <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/10301>
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156       •   We fixed a regression in case-insensitive matching of folded
157           characters in regular expressions introduced in Perl 5.10.1.
158
159           See also: <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/10193>
160

Platform Specific Notes

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

Known Problems

196       •   "List::Util::first" misbehaves in the presence of a lexical $_
197           (typically introduced by "my $_" or implicitly by "given"). The
198           variable which gets set for each iteration is the package variable
199           $_, not the lexical $_.
200
201           A similar issue may occur in other modules that provide functions
202           which take a block as their first argument, like
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204               foo { ... $_ ...} list
205
206           See also: <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/9798>
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208       •   "Module::Load::Conditional" and "version" have an unfortunate
209           interaction which can cause "CPANPLUS" to crash when it encounters
210           an unparseable version string.  Upgrading to "CPANPLUS" 0.9004 or
211           "Module::Load::Conditional" 0.38 from CPAN will resolve this issue.
212

Acknowledgements

214       Perl 5.12.1 represents approximately four weeks of development since
215       Perl 5.12.0 and contains approximately 4,000 lines of changes across
216       142 files from 28 authors.
217
218       Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
219       community of users and developers.  The following people are known to
220       have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.12.1:
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222       AEvar Arnfjoerd` Bjarmason, Chris Williams, chromatic, Craig A. Berry,
223       David Golden, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Frank Wiegand, Gene
224       Sullivan, Goro Fuji, H.Merijn Brand, James E Keenan, Jan Dubois, Jesse
225       Vincent, Josh ben Jore, Karl Williamson, Leon Brocard, Michael Schwern,
226       Nga Tang Chan, Nicholas Clark, Niko Tyni, Philippe Bruhat, Rafael
227       Garcia-Suarez, Ricardo Signes, Steffen Mueller, Todd Rinaldo, Vincent
228       Pit and Zefram.
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Reporting Bugs

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