perl5121delta

PERL5121DELTA(1)       Perl Programmers Reference Guide       PERL5121DELTA(1)

NAME
       perl5121delta - what is new for perl v5.12.1

DESCRIPTION
       This document describes differences between the 5.12.0 release and the
       5.12.1 release.

       If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.10.1, first read
       perl5120delta, which describes differences between 5.10.1 and 5.12.0.

Incompatible Changes
       There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.0. If any
       incompatibilities with 5.12.0 exist, they are bugs. Please report them.

Core Enhancements
       Other than the bug fixes listed below, there should be no user-visible
       changes to the core language in this release.

Modules and Pragmata
   Pragmata Changes
       o   We fixed exporting of "is_strict" and "is_lax" from version.

           These were being exported with a wrapper that treated them as
           method calls, which caused them to fail.  They are just functions,
           are documented as such, and should never be subclassed, so this
           patch just exports them directly as functions without the wrapper.

   Updated Modules
       o   We upgraded CGI.pm to version 3.49 to incorporate fixes for
           regressions introduced in the release we shipped with Perl 5.12.0.

       o   We upgraded Pod::Simple to version 3.14 to get an improvement to
           \C\<\< \>\> parsing.

       o   We made a small fix to the CPANPLUS test suite to fix an occasional
           spurious test failure.

       o   We upgraded Safe to version 2.27 to wrap coderefs returned by
           "reval()" and "rdo()".

Changes to Existing Documentation
       o   We added the new maintenance release policy to perlpolicy.pod

       o   We've clarified the multiple-angle-bracket construct in the spec
           for POD in perlpodspec

       o   We added a missing explanation for a warning about ":=" to
           perldiag.pod

       o   We removed a false claim in perlunitut that all text strings are
           Unicode strings in Perl.

       o   We updated the Github mirror link in perlrepository to
           mirrors/perl, not github/perl

       o   We fixed a minor error in perl5114delta.pod.

       o   We replaced a mention of the now-obsolete Switch.pm with
           given/when.

       o   We improved documentation about $sitelibexp/sitecustomize.pl in
           perlrun.

       o   We corrected perlmodlib.pod which had unintentionally omitted a
           number of modules.

       o   We updated the documentation for 'require' in perlfunc.pod relating
           to putting Perl code in @INC.

       o   We reinstated some erroneously-removed documentation about
           quotemeta in perlfunc.

       o   We fixed an a2p example in perlutil.pod.

       o   We filled in a blank in perlport.pod with the release date of Perl
           5.12.

       o   We fixed broken links in a number of perldelta files.

       o   The documentation for Carp.pm incorrectly stated that the
           $Carp::Verbose variable makes cluck generate stack backtraces.

       o   We fixed a number of typos in Pod::Functions

       o   We improved documentation of case-changing functions in
           perlfunc.pod

       o   We corrected perlgpl.pod to contain the correct version of the GNU
           General Public License.

Testing
   Testing Improvements
       o   t/op/sselect.t is now less prone to clock jitter during timing
           checks on Windows.

           sleep() time on Win32 may be rounded down to multiple of the clock
           tick interval.

       o   lib/blib.t and lib/locale.t: Fixes for test failures on Darwin/PPC

       o   perl5db.t: Fix for test failures when "Term::ReadLine::Gnu" is
           installed.

Installation and Configuration Improvements
   Configuration improvements
       o   We updated INSTALL with notes about how to deal with broken dbm.h
           on OpenSUSE (and possibly other platforms)

Bug Fixes
       o   A bug in how we process filetest operations could cause a segfault.
           Filetests don't always expect an op on the stack, so we now use
           TOPs only if we're sure that we're not stat'ing the _ filehandle.
           This is indicated by OPf_KIDS (as checked in ck_ftst).

           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74542>

       o   When deparsing a nextstate op that has both a change of package
           (relative to the previous nextstate) and a label, the package
           declaration is now emitted first, because it is syntactically
           impermissible for a label to prefix a package declaration.

       o   XSUB.h now correctly redefines fgets under PERL_IMPLICIT_SYS

           See also: <http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=55049>

       o   utf8::is_utf8 now respects GMAGIC (e.g. $1)

       o   XS code using "fputc()" or "fputs()": on Windows could cause an
           error due to their arguments being swapped.

           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=72704>

       o   We fixed a small bug in lex_stuff_pvn() that caused spurious syntax
           errors in an obscure situation.  It happened when stuffing was
           performed on the last line of a file and the line ended with a
           statement that lacked a terminating semicolon.

           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74006>

       o   We fixed a bug that could cause \N{} constructs followed by a
           single . to be parsed incorrectly.

           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74978>

       o   We fixed a bug that caused when(scalar) without an argument not to
           be treated as a syntax error.

           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74114>

       o   We fixed a regression in the handling of labels immediately before
           string evals that was introduced in Perl 5.12.0.

           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74290>

       o   We fixed a regression in case-insensitive matching of folded
           characters in regular expressions introduced in Perl 5.10.1.

           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=72998>

Platform Specific Notes
   HP-UX
       o   Perl now allows -Duse64bitint without promoting to use64bitall on
           HP-UX

   AIX
       o   Perl now builds on AIX 4.2

           The changes required work around AIX 4.2s' lack of support for
           IPv6, and limited support for POSIX "sigaction()".

   FreeBSD 7
       o   FreeBSD 7 no longer contains /usr/bin/objformat. At build time,
           Perl now skips the objformat check for versions 7 and higher and
           assumes ELF.

   VMS
       o   It's now possible to build extensions on older (pre 7.3-2) VMS
           systems.

           DCL symbol length was limited to 1K up until about seven years or
           so ago, but there was no particularly deep reason to prevent those
           older systems from configuring and building Perl.

       o   We fixed the previously-broken "-Uuseperlio" build on VMS.

           We were checking a variable that doesn't exist in the non-default
           case of disabling perlio.  Now we only look at it when it exists.

       o   We fixed the -Uuseperlio command-line option in configure.com.

           Formerly it only worked if you went through all the questions
           interactively and explicitly answered no.

Known Problems
       o   "List::Util::first" misbehaves in the presence of a lexical $_
           (typically introduced by "my $_" or implicitly by "given"). The
           variable which gets set for each iteration is the package variable
           $_, not the lexical $_.

           A similar issue may occur in other modules that provide functions
           which take a block as their first argument, like

               foo { ... $_ ...} list

           See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=67694>

       o   "Module::Load::Conditional" and "version" have an unfortunate
           interaction which can cause "CPANPLUS" to crash when it encounters
           an unparseable version string.  Upgrading to "CPANPLUS" 0.9004 or
           "Module::Load::Conditional" 0.38 from CPAN will resolve this issue.

Acknowledgements
       Perl 5.12.1 represents approximately four weeks of development since
       Perl 5.12.0 and contains approximately 4,000 lines of changes across
       142 files from 28 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 5.12.1:

       AEvar Arnfjordh Bjarmason, Chris Williams, chromatic, Craig A. Berry,
       David Golden, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Frank Wiegand, Gene
       Sullivan, Goro Fuji, H.Merijn Brand, James E Keenan, Jan Dubois, Jesse
       Vincent, Josh ben Jore, Karl Williamson, Leon Brocard, Michael Schwern,
       Nga Tang Chan, Nicholas Clark, Niko Tyni, Philippe Bruhat, Rafael
       Garcia-Suarez, Ricardo Signes, Steffen Mueller, Todd Rinaldo, Vincent
       Pit and Zefram.

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 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.

perl v5.30.0                      2023-11-23                  PERL5121DELTA(1)