PERL5142DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL5142DELTA(1)
NAME
perl5142delta - what is new for perl v5.14.2
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.14.1 release and the
5.14.2 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.14.0, first read
perl5141delta, which describes differences between 5.14.0 and 5.14.1.
Core Enhancements
No changes since 5.14.0.
Security
File::Glob::bsd_glob() memory error with GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC (CVE-2011-2728)
Calling "File::Glob::bsd_glob" with the unsupported flag GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC
would cause an access violation / segfault. A Perl program that accepts
a flags value from an external source could expose itself to denial of
service or arbitrary code execution attacks. There are no known
exploits in the wild. The problem has been corrected by explicitly
disabling all unsupported flags and setting unused function pointers to
null. Bug reported by Clément Lecigne.
"Encode" decode_xs n-byte heap-overflow (CVE-2011-2939)
A bug in "Encode" could, on certain inputs, cause the heap to overflow.
This problem has been corrected. Bug reported by Robert Zacek.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.14.0. If any
exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.
Deprecations
There have been no deprecations since 5.14.0.
Modules and Pragmata
New Modules and Pragmata
None
Updated Modules and Pragmata
• CPAN has been upgraded from version 1.9600 to version 1.9600_01.
CPAN::Distribution has been upgraded from version 1.9602 to
1.9602_01.
Backported bugfixes from CPAN version 1.9800. Ensures proper
detection of "configure_requires" prerequisites from CPAN Meta files
in the case where "dynamic_config" is true. [rt.cpan.org #68835]
Also ensures that "configure_requires" is only checked in META
files, not MYMETA files, so protect against MYMETA generation that
drops "configure_requires".
• Encode has been upgraded from version 2.42 to 2.42_01.
See "Security".
• File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.12 to version 1.13.
See "Security".
• PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from version 0.11 to 0.11_01.
It fixes a problem with "open my $fh, ">", \$scalar" not working if
$scalar is a copy-on-write scalar.
Removed Modules and Pragmata
None
Platform Support
New Platforms
None
Discontinued Platforms
None
Platform-Specific Notes
HP-UX PA-RISC/64 now supports gcc-4.x
A fix to correct the socketsize now makes the test suite pass on HP-
UX PA-RISC for 64bitall builds.
Building on OS X 10.7 Lion and Xcode 4 works again
The build system has been updated to work with the build tools under
Mac OS X 10.7.
Bug Fixes
• In @INC filters (subroutines returned by subroutines in @INC), $_
used to misbehave: If returned from a subroutine, it would not be
copied, but the variable itself would be returned; and freeing $_
(e.g., with "undef *_") would cause perl to crash. This has been
fixed [perl #91880].
• Perl 5.10.0 introduced some faulty logic that made "U*" in the
middle of a pack template equivalent to "U0" if the input string was
empty. This has been fixed [perl #90160].
• "caller" no longer leaks memory when called from the DB package if
@DB::args was assigned to after the first call to "caller". Carp
was triggering this bug [perl #97010].
• "utf8::decode" had a nasty bug that would modify copy-on-write
scalars' string buffers in place (i.e., skipping the copy). This
could result in hashes having two elements with the same key [perl
#91834].
• Localising a tied variable used to make it read-only if it contained
a copy-on-write string.
• Elements of restricted hashes (see the fields pragma) containing
copy-on-write values couldn't be deleted, nor could such hashes be
cleared ("%hash = ()").
• Locking a hash element that is a glob copy no longer causes
subsequent assignment to it to corrupt the glob.
• A panic involving the combination of the regular expression
modifiers "/aa" introduced in 5.14.0 and the "\b" escape sequence
has been fixed [perl #95964].
Known Problems
This is a list of some significant unfixed bugs, which are regressions
from 5.12.0.
• "PERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT" is broken.
Since perl 5.14.0, building with "-DPERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT" hasn't been
possible. This means that perl currently doesn't work on any
platforms that require it to be built this way, including Symbian.
While "PERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT" now works again on recent development
versions of perl, it actually working on Symbian again hasn't been
verified.
We'd be very interested in hearing from anyone working with Perl on
Symbian.
Acknowledgements
Perl 5.14.2 represents approximately three months of development since
Perl 5.14.1 and contains approximately 1200 lines of changes across 61
files from 9 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 5.14.2:
Craig A. Berry, David Golden, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz,
H.Merijn Brand, Karl Williamson, Nicholas Clark, Pau Amma and Ricardo
Signes.
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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