PERL5203DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL5203DELTA(1)
NAME
perl5203delta - what is new for perl v5.20.3
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.20.2 release and the
5.20.3 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.20.1, first read
perl5202delta, which describes differences between 5.20.1 and 5.20.2.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.20.2. If any
exist, they are bugs, and we request that you submit a report. See
"Reporting Bugs" below.
Modules and Pragmata
Updated Modules and Pragmata
• Errno has been upgraded from version 1.20_05 to 1.20_06.
Add -P to the pre-processor command-line on GCC 5. GCC added extra
line directives, breaking parsing of error code definitions. [GH
#14491] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14491>
• Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20150214 to
5.20150822.
Updated to cover the latest releases of Perl.
• perl5db.pl has been upgraded from 1.44 to 1.44_01.
The debugger would cause an assertion failure. [GH #14605]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14605>
Documentation
Changes to Existing Documentation
perlfunc
• Mention that study() is currently a no-op.
perlguts
• The OOK example has been updated to account for COW changes and a
change in the storage of the offset.
perlhacktips
• Documentation has been added illustrating the perils of assuming the
contents of static memory pointed to by the return values of Perl
wrappers for C library functions doesn't change.
perlpodspec
• The specification of the POD language is changing so that the
default encoding of PODs that aren't in UTF-8 (unless otherwise
indicated) is CP1252 instead of ISO-8859-1 (Latin1).
Utility Changes
h2ph
• h2ph now handles hexadecimal constants in the compiler's predefined
macro definitions, as visible in $Config{cppsymbols}. [GH #14491]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14491>
Testing
• t/perf/taint.t has been added to see if optimisations with taint
issues are keeping things fast.
• t/porting/re_context.t has been added to test that utf8 and its
dependencies only use the subset of the "$1..$n" capture vars that
Perl_save_re_context() is hard-coded to localize, because that
function has no efficient way of determining at runtime what vars to
localize.
Platform Support
Platform-Specific Notes
Win32
• Previously, when compiling with a 64-bit Visual C++, every Perl
XS module (including CPAN ones) and Perl aware C file would
unconditionally have around a dozen warnings from hv_func.h.
These warnings have been silenced. GCC (all bitness) and 32-bit
Visual C++ were not affected.
• miniperl.exe is now built with -fno-strict-aliasing, allowing
64-bit builds to complete with GCC 4.8. [GH #14556]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14556>
Selected Bug Fixes
• Repeated global pattern matches in scalar context on large tainted
strings were exponentially slow depending on the current match
position in the string. [GH #14238]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14238>
• The original visible value of $/ is now preserved when it is set to
an invalid value. Previously if you set $/ to a reference to an
array, for example, perl would produce a runtime error and not set
PL_rs, but Perl code that checked $/ would see the array reference.
[GH #14245] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14245>
• Perl 5.14.0 introduced a bug whereby "eval { LABEL: }" would crash.
This has been fixed. [GH #14438]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14438>
• Extending an array cloned from a parent thread could result in
"Modification of a read-only value attempted" errors when attempting
to modify the new elements. [GH #14605]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14605>
• Several cases of data used to store environment variable contents in
core C code being potentially overwritten before being used have
been fixed. [GH #14476]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14476>
• UTF-8 variable names used in array indexes, unquoted UTF-8 HERE-
document terminators and UTF-8 function names all now work
correctly. [GH #14601] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14601>
• A subtle bug introduced in Perl 5.20.2 involving UTF-8 in regular
expressions and sometimes causing a crash has been fixed. A new
test script has been added to test this fix; see under "Testing".
[GH #14600] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14600>
• Some patterns starting with "/.*..../" matched against long strings
have been slow since Perl 5.8, and some of the form "/.*..../i" have
been slow since Perl 5.18. They are now all fast again. [GH
#14475] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14475>
• Warning fatality is now ignored when rewinding the stack. This
prevents infinite recursion when the now fatal error also causes
rewinding of the stack. [GH #14319]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14319>
• setpgrp($nonzero) (with one argument) was accidentally changed in
Perl 5.16 to mean setpgrp(0). This has been fixed.
• A crash with "%::=(); J->${\"::"}" has been fixed. [GH #14790]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14790>
• Regular expression possessive quantifier Perl 5.20 regression now
fixed. "qr/"PAT"{"min,max"}+""/" is supposed to behave identically
to "qr/(?>"PAT"{"min,max"})/". Since Perl 5.20, this didn't work if
min and max were equal. [GH #14857]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14857>
• Code like "/$a[/" used to read the next line of input and treat it
as though it came immediately after the opening bracket. Some
invalid code consequently would parse and run, but some code caused
crashes, so this is now disallowed. [GH #14462]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14462>
Acknowledgements
Perl 5.20.3 represents approximately 7 months of development since Perl
5.20.2 and contains approximately 3,200 lines of changes across 99 files
from 26 authors.
Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
were approximately 1,500 lines of changes to 43 .pm, .t, .c and .h
files.
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 5.20.3:
Alex Vandiver, Andy Dougherty, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Chris 'BinGOs'
Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Daniel Dragan, David
Mitchell, Father Chrysostomos, H.Merijn Brand, James E Keenan, James
McCoy, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, kmx, Lajos
Veres, Lukas Mai, Matthew Horsfall, Petr Písař, Randy Stauner, Ricardo
Signes, Sawyer X, Steve Hay, Tony Cook, Yves Orton.
The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
generated from version control history. In particular, it does not
include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.
Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN
modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN
community for helping Perl to flourish.
For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,
please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.
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 https://rt.perl.org/ . 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 will 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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