1PERL5202DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL5202DELTA(1)
2
6 perl5202delta - what is new for perl v5.20.2
7
9 This document describes differences between the 5.20.1 release and the
10 5.20.2 release.
11 If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.20.0, first read
13 perl5201delta, which describes differences between 5.20.0 and 5.20.1.
14
16 There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.20.1. If any
17 exist, they are bugs, and we request that you submit a report. See
18 "Reporting Bugs" below.
19
21 Updated Modules and Pragmata
22 • attributes has been upgraded from version 0.22 to 0.23.
23 The usage of "memEQs" in the XS has been corrected. [GH #14072]
25 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14072>
26 • Data::Dumper has been upgraded from version 2.151 to 2.151_01.
28 Fixes CVE-2014-4330 by adding a configuration variable/option to
30 limit recursion when dumping deep data structures.
31 • Errno has been upgraded from version 1.20_03 to 1.20_05.
33 Warnings when building the XS on Windows with the Visual C++
35 compiler are now avoided.
36 • feature has been upgraded from version 1.36 to 1.36_01.
38 The "postderef" feature has now been documented. This feature was
40 actually added in Perl 5.20.0 but was accidentally omitted from the
41 feature documentation until now.
42 • IO::Socket has been upgraded from version 1.37 to 1.38.
44 Document the limitations of the connected() method. [GH #14199]
46 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14199>
47 • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.020001 to
49 5.20150214.
50 The list of Perl versions covered has been updated.
52 • PathTools has been upgraded from version 3.48 to 3.48_01.
54 A warning from the gcc compiler is now avoided when building the
56 XS.
57 • PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from version 0.18 to 0.18_01.
59 Reading from a position well past the end of the scalar now
61 correctly returns end of file. [GH #14342]
62 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14342>
63 Seeking to a negative position still fails, but no longer leaves
65 the file position set to a negation location.
66 eof() on a "PerlIO::scalar" handle now properly returns true when
68 the file position is past the 2GB mark on 32-bit systems.
69 • Storable has been upgraded from version 2.49 to 2.49_01.
71 Minor grammatical change to the documentation only.
73 • VMS::DCLsym has been upgraded from version 1.05 to 1.05_01.
75 Minor formatting change to the documentation only.
77 • VMS::Stdio has been upgraded from version 2.4 to 2.41.
79 Minor formatting change to the documentation only.
81
83 New Documentation
84 perlunicook
85 This document, by Tom Christiansen, provides examples of handling
87 Unicode in Perl.
88 Changes to Existing Documentation
90 perlexperiment
91 • Added reference to subroutine signatures. This feature was
93 actually added in Perl 5.20.0 but was accidentally omitted from the
94 experimental feature documentation until now.
95 perlpolicy
97 • The process whereby features may graduate from experimental status
99 has now been formally documented.
100 perlsyn
102 • An ambiguity in the documentation of the ellipsis statement has
104 been corrected. [GH #14054]
105 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14054>
106
108 The following additions or changes have been made to diagnostic output,
109 including warnings and fatal error messages. For the complete list of
110 diagnostic messages, see perldiag.
111 Changes to Existing Diagnostics
113 • Bad symbol for scalar is now documented. This error is not new,
114 but was not previously documented here.
115 • Missing right brace on \N{} is now documented. This error is not
117 new, but was not previously documented here.
118
120 • The test script re/rt122747.t has been added to verify that [GH
121 #14081] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14081> remains fixed.
122
124 Regained Platforms
125 IRIX and Tru64 platforms are working again. (Some "make test" failures
126 remain.)
127
129 • AIX now sets the length in "getsockopt" correctly. [GH #13484]
130 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/13484>, [cpan #91183]
131 <https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=91183>, [cpan #85570]
132 <https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=85570>
133 • In Perl 5.20.0, $^N accidentally had the internal UTF8 flag turned
135 off if accessed from a code block within a regular expression,
136 effectively UTF8-encoding the value. This has been fixed. [GH
137 #14211] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14211>
138 • Various cases where the name of a sub is used (autoload,
140 overloading, error messages) used to crash for lexical subs, but
141 have been fixed.
142 • An assertion failure when parsing "sort" with debugging enabled has
144 been fixed. [GH #14087]
145 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14087>
146 • Loading UTF8 tables during a regular expression match could cause
148 assertion failures under debugging builds if the previous match
149 used the very same regular expression. [GH #14081]
150 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14081>
151 • Due to a mistake in the string-copying logic, copying the value of
153 a state variable could instead steal the value and undefine the
154 variable. This bug, introduced in Perl 5.20, would happen mostly
155 for long strings (1250 chars or more), but could happen for any
156 strings under builds with copy-on-write disabled. [GH #14175]
157 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14175>
158 • Fixed a bug that could cause perl to execute an infinite loop
160 during compilation. [GH #14165]
161 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14165>
162 • On Win32, restoring in a child pseudo-process a variable that was
164 local()ed in a parent pseudo-process before the "fork" happened
165 caused memory corruption and a crash in the child pseudo-process
166 (and therefore OS process). [GH #8641]
167 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/8641>
168 • Tainted constants evaluated at compile time no longer cause
170 unrelated statements to become tainted. [GH #14059]
171 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14059>
172 • Calling "write" on a format with a "^**" field could produce a
174 panic in sv_chop() if there were insufficient arguments or if the
175 variable used to fill the field was empty. [GH #14255]
176 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14255>
177 • In Perl 5.20.0, "sort CORE::fake" where 'fake' is anything other
179 than a keyword started chopping of the last 6 characters and
180 treating the result as a sort sub name. The previous behaviour of
181 treating "CORE::fake" as a sort sub name has been restored. [GH
182 #14323] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14323>
183 • A bug in regular expression patterns that could lead to segfaults
185 and other crashes has been fixed. This occurred only in patterns
186 compiled with "/i", while taking into account the current POSIX
187 locale (this usually means they have to be compiled within the
188 scope of "use locale"), and there must be a string of at least 128
189 consecutive bytes to match. [GH #14389]
190 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14389>
191 • "qr/@array(?{block})/" no longer dies with "Bizarre copy of ARRAY".
193 [GH #14292] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14292>
194 • "gmtime" no longer crashes with not-a-number values. [GH #14365]
196 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14365>
197 • Certain syntax errors in substitutions, such as "s/${<>{})//",
199 would crash, and had done so since Perl 5.10. (In some cases the
200 crash did not start happening until Perl 5.16.) The crash has, of
201 course, been fixed. [GH #14391]
202 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14391>
203 • A memory leak in some regular expressions, introduced in Perl
205 5.20.1, has been fixed. [GH #14236]
206 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14236>
207 • "formline("@...", "a");" would crash. The "FF_CHECKNL" case in
209 pp_formline() didn't set the pointer used to mark the chop
210 position, which led to the "FF_MORE" case crashing with a
211 segmentation fault. This has been fixed. [GH #14388]
212 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14388> [GH #14425]
213 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14425>
214 • A possible buffer overrun and crash when parsing a literal pattern
216 during regular expression compilation has been fixed. [GH #14416]
217 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14416>
218
220 • It is a known bug that lexical subroutines cannot be used as the
221 "SUBNAME" argument to "sort". This will be fixed in a future
222 version of Perl.
223
225 • A regression has been fixed that was introduced in Perl 5.20.0
226 (fixed in Perl 5.20.1 as well as here) in which a UTF-8 encoded
227 regular expression pattern that contains a single ASCII lowercase
228 letter does not match its uppercase counterpart. [GH #14051]
229 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14051>
230
232 Perl 5.20.2 represents approximately 5 months of development since Perl
233 5.20.1 and contains approximately 6,300 lines of changes across 170
234 files from 34 authors.
235 Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
237 were approximately 1,900 lines of changes to 80 .pm, .t, .c and .h
238 files.
239 Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
241 community of users and developers. The following people are known to
242 have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.20.2:
243 Aaron Crane, Abigail, Andreas Voegele, Andy Dougherty, Anthony Heading,
245 Aristotle Pagaltzis, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel
246 Dragan, Doug Bell, Ed J, Father Chrysostomos, Glenn D. Golden, H.Merijn
247 Brand, Hugo van der Sanden, James E Keenan, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Jim
248 Cromie, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, kmx, Matthew Horsfall, Max
249 Maischein, Peter Martini, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Ricardo Signes, Shlomi
250 Fish, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Müller, Steve Hay, Tadeusz Sośnierz, Tony
251 Cook, Yves Orton, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason.
252 The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
254 generated from version control history. In particular, it does not
255 include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
256 reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.
257 Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN
259 modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN
260 community for helping Perl to flourish.
261 For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,
263 please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.
264
266 If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
267 recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
268 database at https://rt.perl.org/ . There may also be information at
269 http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.
270 If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
272 program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a
273 tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output
274 of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
275 the Perl porting team.
276 If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it
278 inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please
279 send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed
280 subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core
281 committers, who will be able to help assess the impact of issues,
282 figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to
283 mitigate or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is
284 supported. Please only use this address for security issues in the
285 Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
286
288 The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details
289 on what changed.
290 The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
292 The README file for general stuff.
294 The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
296perl v5.38.2 2023-11-30 PERL5202DELTA(1)