perl5181delta(1)

1PERL5181DELTA(1)       Perl Programmers Reference Guide       PERL5181DELTA(1)
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NAME

6       perl5181delta - what is new for perl v5.18.1
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DESCRIPTION

9       This document describes differences between the 5.18.0 release and the
10       5.18.1 release.
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12       If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.16.0, first read
13       perl5180delta, which describes differences between 5.16.0 and 5.18.0.
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Incompatible Changes

16       There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.18.0 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       •   B has been upgraded from 1.42 to 1.42_01, fixing bugs related to
23           lexical subroutines.
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25       •   Digest::SHA has been upgraded from 5.84 to 5.84_01, fixing a
26           crashing bug.  [RT #118649]
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28       •   Module::CoreList has been upgraded from 2.89 to 2.96.
29

Platform Support

31   Platform-Specific Notes
32       AIX A rarely-encountered configuration bug in the AIX hints file has
33           been corrected.
34
35       MidnightBSD
36           After a patch to the relevant hints file, perl should now build
37           correctly on MidnightBSD 0.4-RELEASE.
38

Selected Bug Fixes

40       •   Starting in v5.18.0, a construct like "/[#](?{})/x" would have its
41           "#" incorrectly interpreted as a comment.  The code block would be
42           skipped, unparsed.  This has been corrected.
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44       •   A number of memory leaks related to the new, experimental regexp
45           bracketed character class feature have been plugged.
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47       •   The OP allocation code now returns correctly aligned memory in all
48           cases for "struct pmop". Previously it could return memory only
49           aligned to a 4-byte boundary, which is not correct for an ithreads
50           build with 64 bit IVs on some 32 bit platforms. Notably, this
51           caused the build to fail completely on sparc GNU/Linux. [RT
52           #118055]
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54       •   The debugger's "man" command been fixed. It was broken in the
55           v5.18.0 release. The "man" command is aliased to the names "doc"
56           and "perldoc" - all now work again.
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58       •   @_ is now correctly visible in the debugger, fixing a regression
59           introduced in v5.18.0's debugger. [RT #118169]
60
61       •   Fixed a small number of regexp constructions that could either fail
62           to match or crash perl when the string being matched against was
63           allocated above the 2GB line on 32-bit systems. [RT #118175]
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65       •   Perl v5.16 inadvertently introduced a bug whereby calls to XSUBs
66           that were not visible at compile time were treated as lvalues and
67           could be assigned to, even when the subroutine was not an lvalue
68           sub.  This has been fixed.  [perl #117947]
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70       •   Perl v5.18 inadvertently introduced a bug whereby dual-vars (i.e.
71           variables with both string and numeric values, such as $! ) where
72           the truthness of the variable was determined by the numeric value
73           rather than the string value. [RT #118159]
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75       •   Perl v5.18 inadvertently introduced a bug whereby interpolating
76           mixed up- and down-graded UTF-8 strings in a regex could result in
77           malformed UTF-8 in the pattern: specifically if a downgraded
78           character in the range "\x80..\xff" followed a UTF-8 string, e.g.
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80               utf8::upgrade(  my $u = "\x{e5}");
81               utf8::downgrade(my $d = "\x{e5}");
82               /$u$d/
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84           [perl #118297].
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86       •   Lexical constants ("my sub a() { 42 }") no longer crash when
87           inlined.
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89       •   Parameter prototypes attached to lexical subroutines are now
90           respected when compiling sub calls without parentheses.
91           Previously, the prototypes were honoured only for calls with
92           parentheses. [RT #116735]
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94       •   Syntax errors in lexical subroutines in combination with calls to
95           the same subroutines no longer cause crashes at compile time.
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97       •   The dtrace sub-entry probe now works with lexical subs, instead of
98           crashing [perl #118305].
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100       •   Undefining an inlinable lexical subroutine (my sub foo() { 42 }
101           undef &foo) would result in a crash if warnings were turned on.
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103       •   Deep recursion warnings no longer crash lexical subroutines. [RT
104           #118521]
105

Acknowledgements

107       Perl 5.18.1 represents approximately 2 months of development since Perl
108       5.18.0 and contains approximately 8,400 lines of changes across 60
109       files from 12 authors.
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111       Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
112       community of users and developers. The following people are known to
113       have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.18.1:
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115       Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker,
116       David Mitchell, Father Chrysostomos, Karl Williamson, Lukas Mai,
117       Nicholas Clark, Peter Martini, Ricardo Signes, Shlomi Fish, Tony Cook.
118
119       The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
120       generated from version control history. In particular, it does not
121       include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
122       reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.
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124       Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN
125       modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN
126       community for helping Perl to flourish.
127
128       For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,
129       please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.
130

Reporting Bugs

132       If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
133       recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
134       database at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ .  There may also be
135       information at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.
136
137       If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
138       program included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a
139       tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output
140       of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
141       the Perl porting team.
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143       If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it
144       inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please
145       send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org.  This points to a closed
146       subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core
147       committers, who will be able to help assess the impact of issues,
148       figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to
149       mitigate or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is
150       supported.  Please only use this address for security issues in the
151       Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
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