PERL5124DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL5124DELTA(1)
NAME
perl5124delta - what is new for perl v5.12.4
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.12.3 release and the
5.12.4 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.12.2, first read
perl5123delta, which describes differences between 5.12.2 and 5.12.3.
The major changes made in 5.12.0 are described in perl5120delta.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.3. If any
exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.
Selected Bug Fixes
When strict "refs" mode is off, "%{...}" in rvalue context returns
"undef" if its argument is undefined. An optimisation introduced in
Perl 5.12.0 to make "keys %{...}" faster when used as a boolean did not
take this into account, causing "keys %{+undef}" (and "keys %$foo" when
$foo is undefined) to be an error, which it should be so in strict mode
only [perl #81750].
"lc", "uc", "lcfirst", and "ucfirst" no longer return untainted strings
when the argument is tainted. This has been broken since perl 5.8.9
[perl #87336].
Fixed a case where it was possible that a freed buffer may have been
read from when parsing a here document.
Modules and Pragmata
Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 2.43 to 2.50.
Testing
The cpan/CGI/t/http.t test script has been fixed to work when the
environment has HTTPS_* environment variables, such as HTTPS_PROXY.
Documentation
Updated the documentation for rand() in perlfunc to note that it is not
cryptographically secure.
Platform Specific Notes
Linux
Support Ubuntu 11.04's new multi-arch library layout.
Acknowledgements
Perl 5.12.4 represents approximately 5 months of development since Perl
5.12.3 and contains approximately 200 lines of changes across 11 files
from 8 authors.
Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
community of users and developers. The following people are known to
have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.12.4:
Andy Dougherty, David Golden, David Leadbeater, Father Chrysostomos,
Florian Ragwitz, Jesse Vincent, Leon Brocard, Zsbán Ambrus.
Reporting Bugs
If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
database at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ . There may also be information
at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.
If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a
tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output
of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the
Perl porting team.
If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it
inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please
send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed
subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core
committers, who be able to help assess the impact of issues, figure out
a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate or
fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is supported. Please
only use this address for security issues in the Perl core, not for
modules independently distributed on CPAN.
SEE ALSO
The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on
what changed.
The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
The README file for general stuff.
The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
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