perl5122delta(1)

1PERL5122DELTA(1)       Perl Programmers Reference Guide       PERL5122DELTA(1)
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NAME

6       perl5122delta - what is new for perl v5.12.2
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DESCRIPTION

9       This document describes differences between the 5.12.1 release and the
10       5.12.2 release.
11
12       If you are upgrading from an earlier major version, such as 5.10.1,
13       first read perl5120delta, which describes differences between 5.10.0
14       and 5.12.0, as well as perl5121delta, which describes earlier changes
15       in the 5.12 stable release series.
16

Incompatible Changes

18       There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.1. If any
19       exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.
20

Core Enhancements

22       Other than the bug fixes listed below, there should be no user-visible
23       changes to the core language in this release.
24

Modules and Pragmata

26   New Modules and Pragmata
27       This release does not introduce any new modules or pragmata.
28
29   Pragmata Changes
30       In the previous release, "no VERSION;" statements triggered a bug which
31       could cause feature bundles to be loaded and strict mode to be enabled
32       unintentionally.
33
34   Updated Modules
35       "Carp"
36           Upgraded from version 1.16 to 1.17.
37
38           Carp now detects incomplete caller() overrides and avoids using
39           bogus @DB::args. To provide backtraces, Carp relies on particular
40           behaviour of the caller built-in. Carp now detects if other code
41           has overridden this with an incomplete implementation, and modifies
42           its backtrace accordingly. Previously incomplete overrides would
43           cause incorrect values in backtraces (best case), or obscure fatal
44           errors (worst case)
45
46           This fixes certain cases of "Bizarre copy of ARRAY" caused by
47           modules overriding caller() incorrectly.
48
49       "CPANPLUS"
50           A patch to cpanp-run-perl has been backported from CPANPLUS 0.9004.
51           This resolves RT #55964
52           <http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=55964> and RT #57106
53           <http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=57106>, both of
54           which related to failures to install distributions that use
55           "Module::Install::DSL".
56
57       "File::Glob"
58           A regression which caused a failure to find "CORE::GLOBAL::glob"
59           after loading "File::Glob" to crash has been fixed.  Now, it
60           correctly falls back to external globbing via "pp_glob".
61
62       "File::Copy"
63           "File::Copy::copy(FILE, DIR)" is now documented.
64
65       "File::Spec"
66           Upgraded from version 3.31 to 3.31_01.
67
68           Several portability fixes were made in "File::Spec::VMS": a colon
69           is now recognized as a delimiter in native filespecs; caret-escaped
70           delimiters are recognized for better handling of extended
71           filespecs; catpath() returns an empty directory rather than the
72           current directory if the input directory name is empty; abs2rel()
73           properly handles Unix-style input.
74

Utility Changes

76       •   perlbug now always gives the reporter a chance to change the email
77           address it guesses for them.
78
79       •   perlbug should no longer warn about uninitialized values when using
80           the "-d" and "-v" options.
81

Changes to Existing Documentation

83       •   The existing policy on backward-compatibility and deprecation has
84           been added to perlpolicy, along with definitions of terms like
85           deprecation.
86
87       •   "srand" in perlfunc's usage has been clarified.
88
89       •   The entry for "die" in perlfunc was reorganized to emphasize its
90           role in the exception mechanism.
91
92       •   Perl's INSTALL file has been clarified to explicitly state that
93           Perl requires a C89 compliant ANSI C Compiler.
94
95       •   IO::Socket's getsockopt() and setsockopt() have been documented.
96
97       •   alarm()'s inability to interrupt blocking IO on Windows has been
98           documented.
99
100       •   Math::TrulyRandom hasn't been updated since 1996 and has been
101           removed as a recommended solution for random number generation.
102
103       •   perlrun has been updated to clarify the behaviour of octal flags to
104           perl.
105
106       •   To ease user confusion, $# and $*, two special variables that were
107           removed in earlier versions of Perl have been documented.
108
109       •   The version of perlfaq shipped with the Perl core has been updated
110           from the official FAQ version, which is now maintained in the
111           "briandfoy/perlfaq" branch of the Perl repository at
112           <git://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git>.
113

Installation and Configuration Improvements

115   Configuration improvements
116       •   The "d_u32align" configuration probe on ARM has been fixed.
117
118   Compilation improvements
119       •   An ""incompatible operand types"" error in ternary expressions when
120           building with "clang" has been fixed.
121
122       •   Perl now skips setuid "File::Copy" tests on partitions it detects
123           to be mounted as "nosuid".
124

Selected Bug Fixes

126       •   A possible segfault in the "T_PRTOBJ" default typemap has been
127           fixed.
128
129       •   A possible memory leak when using caller() to set @DB::args has
130           been fixed.
131
132       •   Several memory leaks when loading XS modules were fixed.
133
134       •   unpack() now handles scalar context correctly for %32H and %32u,
135           fixing a potential crash.  split() would crash because the third
136           item on the stack wasn't the regular expression it expected.
137           "unpack("%2H", ...)" would return both the unpacked result and the
138           checksum on the stack, as would "unpack("%2u", ...)".  [GH #10257]
139           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/10257>
140
141       •   Perl now avoids using memory after calling free() in pp_require
142           when there are CODEREFs in @INC.
143
144       •   A bug that could cause ""Unknown error"" messages when
145           ""call_sv(code, G_EVAL)"" is called from an XS destructor has been
146           fixed.
147
148       •   The implementation of the "open $fh, '>' \$buffer" feature now
149           supports get/set magic and thus tied buffers correctly.
150
151       •   The "pp_getc", "pp_tell", and "pp_eof" opcodes now make room on the
152           stack for their return values in cases where no argument was passed
153           in.
154
155       •   When matching unicode strings under some conditions inappropriate
156           backtracking would result in a "Malformed UTF-8 character (fatal)"
157           error. This should no longer occur.  See  [GH #10434]
158           <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/10434>
159

Platform Specific Notes

161   AIX
162       •   README.aix has been updated with information about the XL C/C++ V11
163           compiler suite.
164
165   Windows
166       •   When building Perl with the mingw64 x64 cross-compiler "incpath",
167           "libpth", "ldflags", "lddlflags" and "ldflags_nolargefiles" values
168           in Config.pm and Config_heavy.pl were not previously being set
169           correctly because, with that compiler, the include and lib
170           directories are not immediately below "$(CCHOME)".
171
172   VMS
173       •   git_version.h is now installed on VMS. This was an oversight in
174           v5.12.0 which caused some extensions to fail to build.
175
176       •   Several memory leaks in stat() have been fixed.
177
178       •   A memory leak in Perl_rename() due to a double allocation has been
179           fixed.
180
181       •   A memory leak in vms_fid_to_name() (used by realpath() and
182           realname()) has been fixed.
183

Acknowledgements

185       Perl 5.12.2 represents approximately three months of development since
186       Perl 5.12.1 and contains approximately 2,000 lines of changes across
187       100 files from 36 authors.
188
189       Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
190       community of users and developers.  The following people are known to
191       have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.12.2:
192
193       Abigail, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Ben Morrow, brian d foy, Brian
194       Phillips, Chas. Owens, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Chris Williams, Craig
195       A. Berry, Curtis Jewell, Dan Dascalescu, David Golden, David Mitchell,
196       Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, George Greer, H.Merijn Brand, Jan
197       Dubois, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, Karl Williamson, Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ
198       迪拉斯, Leon Brocard, Maik Hentsche, Matt S Trout, Nicholas Clark,
199       Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Rainer Tammer, Ricardo Signes, Salvador Ortiz
200       Garcia, Sisyphus, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Mueller, Tony Cook, Vincent Pit
201       and Yves Orton.
202

Reporting Bugs

204       If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
205       recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
206       database at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ .  There may also be
207       information at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.
208
209       If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
210       program included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a
211       tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output
212       of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
213       the Perl porting team.
214
215       If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it
216       inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please
217       send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed
218       subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core
219       committers, who will be able to help assess the impact of issues,
220       figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to
221       mitigate or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is
222       supported. Please only use this address for security issues in the Perl
223       core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
224