PERL5202DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL5202DELTA(1)
NAME
perl5202delta - what is new for perl v5.20.2
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.20.1 release and the
5.20.2 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.20.0, first read
perl5201delta, which describes differences between 5.20.0 and 5.20.1.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.20.1. 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
• attributes has been upgraded from version 0.22 to 0.23.
The usage of "memEQs" in the XS has been corrected. [GH #14072]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14072>
• Data::Dumper has been upgraded from version 2.151 to 2.151_01.
Fixes CVE-2014-4330 by adding a configuration variable/option to
limit recursion when dumping deep data structures.
• Errno has been upgraded from version 1.20_03 to 1.20_05.
Warnings when building the XS on Windows with the Visual C++
compiler are now avoided.
• feature has been upgraded from version 1.36 to 1.36_01.
The "postderef" feature has now been documented. This feature was
actually added in Perl 5.20.0 but was accidentally omitted from the
feature documentation until now.
• IO::Socket has been upgraded from version 1.37 to 1.38.
Document the limitations of the connected() method. [GH #14199]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14199>
• Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.020001 to
5.20150214.
The list of Perl versions covered has been updated.
• PathTools has been upgraded from version 3.48 to 3.48_01.
A warning from the gcc compiler is now avoided when building the XS.
• PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from version 0.18 to 0.18_01.
Reading from a position well past the end of the scalar now
correctly returns end of file. [GH #14342]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14342>
Seeking to a negative position still fails, but no longer leaves the
file position set to a negation location.
eof() on a "PerlIO::scalar" handle now properly returns true when
the file position is past the 2GB mark on 32-bit systems.
• Storable has been upgraded from version 2.49 to 2.49_01.
Minor grammatical change to the documentation only.
• VMS::DCLsym has been upgraded from version 1.05 to 1.05_01.
Minor formatting change to the documentation only.
• VMS::Stdio has been upgraded from version 2.4 to 2.41.
Minor formatting change to the documentation only.
Documentation
New Documentation
perlunicook
This document, by Tom Christiansen, provides examples of handling
Unicode in Perl.
Changes to Existing Documentation
perlexperiment
• Added reference to subroutine signatures. This feature was actually
added in Perl 5.20.0 but was accidentally omitted from the
experimental feature documentation until now.
perlpolicy
• The process whereby features may graduate from experimental status
has now been formally documented.
perlsyn
• An ambiguity in the documentation of the ellipsis statement has been
corrected. [GH #14054] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14054>
Diagnostics
The following additions or changes have been made to diagnostic output,
including warnings and fatal error messages. For the complete list of
diagnostic messages, see perldiag.
Changes to Existing Diagnostics
• Bad symbol for scalar is now documented. This error is not new, but
was not previously documented here.
• Missing right brace on \N{} is now documented. This error is not
new, but was not previously documented here.
Testing
• The test script re/rt122747.t has been added to verify that [GH
#14081] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14081> remains fixed.
Platform Support
Regained Platforms
IRIX and Tru64 platforms are working again. (Some "make test" failures
remain.)
Selected Bug Fixes
• AIX now sets the length in "getsockopt" correctly. [GH #13484]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/13484>, [cpan #91183]
<https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=91183>, [cpan #85570]
<https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=85570>
• In Perl 5.20.0, $^N accidentally had the internal UTF8 flag turned
off if accessed from a code block within a regular expression,
effectively UTF8-encoding the value. This has been fixed. [GH
#14211] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14211>
• Various cases where the name of a sub is used (autoload,
overloading, error messages) used to crash for lexical subs, but
have been fixed.
• An assertion failure when parsing "sort" with debugging enabled has
been fixed. [GH #14087]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14087>
• Loading UTF8 tables during a regular expression match could cause
assertion failures under debugging builds if the previous match used
the very same regular expression. [GH #14081]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14081>
• Due to a mistake in the string-copying logic, copying the value of a
state variable could instead steal the value and undefine the
variable. This bug, introduced in Perl 5.20, would happen mostly
for long strings (1250 chars or more), but could happen for any
strings under builds with copy-on-write disabled. [GH #14175]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14175>
• Fixed a bug that could cause perl to execute an infinite loop during
compilation. [GH #14165]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14165>
• On Win32, restoring in a child pseudo-process a variable that was
local()ed in a parent pseudo-process before the "fork" happened
caused memory corruption and a crash in the child pseudo-process
(and therefore OS process). [GH #8641]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/8641>
• Tainted constants evaluated at compile time no longer cause
unrelated statements to become tainted. [GH #14059]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14059>
• Calling "write" on a format with a "^**" field could produce a panic
in sv_chop() if there were insufficient arguments or if the variable
used to fill the field was empty. [GH #14255]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14255>
• In Perl 5.20.0, "sort CORE::fake" where 'fake' is anything other
than a keyword started chopping of the last 6 characters and
treating the result as a sort sub name. The previous behaviour of
treating "CORE::fake" as a sort sub name has been restored. [GH
#14323] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14323>
• A bug in regular expression patterns that could lead to segfaults
and other crashes has been fixed. This occurred only in patterns
compiled with "/i", while taking into account the current POSIX
locale (this usually means they have to be compiled within the scope
of "use locale"), and there must be a string of at least 128
consecutive bytes to match. [GH #14389]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14389>
• "qr/@array(?{block})/" no longer dies with "Bizarre copy of ARRAY".
[GH #14292] <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14292>
• "gmtime" no longer crashes with not-a-number values. [GH #14365]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14365>
• Certain syntax errors in substitutions, such as "s/${<>{})//", would
crash, and had done so since Perl 5.10. (In some cases the crash
did not start happening until Perl 5.16.) The crash has, of course,
been fixed. [GH #14391]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14391>
• A memory leak in some regular expressions, introduced in Perl
5.20.1, has been fixed. [GH #14236]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14236>
• "formline("@...", "a");" would crash. The "FF_CHECKNL" case in
pp_formline() didn't set the pointer used to mark the chop position,
which led to the "FF_MORE" case crashing with a segmentation fault.
This has been fixed. [GH #14388]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14388> [GH #14425]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14425>
• A possible buffer overrun and crash when parsing a literal pattern
during regular expression compilation has been fixed. [GH #14416]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14416>
Known Problems
• It is a known bug that lexical subroutines cannot be used as the
"SUBNAME" argument to "sort". This will be fixed in a future
version of Perl.
Errata From Previous Releases
• A regression has been fixed that was introduced in Perl 5.20.0
(fixed in Perl 5.20.1 as well as here) in which a UTF-8 encoded
regular expression pattern that contains a single ASCII lowercase
letter does not match its uppercase counterpart. [GH #14051]
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/14051>
Acknowledgements
Perl 5.20.2 represents approximately 5 months of development since Perl
5.20.1 and contains approximately 6,300 lines of changes across 170
files from 34 authors.
Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
were approximately 1,900 lines of changes to 80 .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 5.20.2:
Aaron Crane, Abigail, Andreas Voegele, Andy Dougherty, Anthony Heading,
Aristotle Pagaltzis, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel
Dragan, Doug Bell, Ed J, Father Chrysostomos, Glenn D. Golden, H.Merijn
Brand, Hugo van der Sanden, James E Keenan, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Jim
Cromie, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, kmx, Matthew Horsfall, Max
Maischein, Peter Martini, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Ricardo Signes, Shlomi
Fish, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Müller, Steve Hay, Tadeusz Sośnierz, Tony
Cook, Yves Orton, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason.
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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