perl5125delta

PERL5125DELTA(1)       Perl Programmers Reference Guide       PERL5125DELTA(1)

NAME
       perl5125delta - what is new for perl v5.12.5

DESCRIPTION
       This document describes differences between the 5.12.4 release and the
       5.12.5 release.

       If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.12.3, first read
       perl5124delta, which describes differences between 5.12.3 and 5.12.4.

Security
   "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.

   "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 Clement Lecigne.

   Heap buffer overrun in 'x' string repeat operator (CVE-2012-5195)
       Poorly written perl code that allows an attacker to specify the count
       to perl's 'x' string repeat operator can already cause a memory
       exhaustion denial-of-service attack. A flaw in versions of perl before
       5.15.5 can escalate that into a heap buffer overrun; coupled with
       versions of glibc before 2.16, it possibly allows the execution of
       arbitrary code.

       This problem has been fixed.

Incompatible Changes
       There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.4. If any
       exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.

Modules and Pragmata
   Updated Modules
       B::Concise

       B::Concise no longer produces mangled output with the -tree option
       [perl #80632].

       charnames

       A regression introduced in Perl 5.8.8 has been fixed, that caused
       charnames::viacode(0) to return "undef" instead of the string "NULL"
       [perl #72624].

       Encode has been upgraded from version 2.39 to version 2.39_01.

       See "Security".

       File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.07 to version 1.07_01.

       See "Security".

       Unicode::UCD

       The documentation for the "upper" function now actually says "upper",
       not "lower".

       Module::CoreList

       Module::CoreList has been updated to version 2.50_02 to add data for
       this release.

Changes to Existing Documentation
   perlebcdic
       The perlebcdic document contains a helpful table to use in "tr///" to
       convert between EBCDIC and Latin1/ASCII.  Unfortunately, the table was
       the inverse of the one it describes.  This has been corrected.

   perlunicode
       The section on User-Defined Case Mappings had some bad markup and
       unclear sentences, making parts of it unreadable.  This has been
       rectified.

   perluniprops
       This document has been corrected to take non-ASCII platforms into
       account.

Installation and Configuration Improvements
   Platform Specific Changes
       Mac OS X
           There have been configuration and test fixes to make Perl build
           cleanly on Lion and Mountain Lion.

       NetBSD
           The NetBSD hints file was corrected to be compatible with NetBSD
           6.*

Selected Bug Fixes
       o   "chop" now correctly handles characters above "\x{7fffffff}" [perl
           #73246].

       o   "($<,$>) = (...)" stopped working properly in 5.12.0.  It is
           supposed to make a single "setreuid()" call, rather than calling
           "setruid()" and "seteuid()" separately.  Consequently it did not
           work properly.  This has been fixed [perl #75212].

       o   Fixed a regression of kill() when a match variable is used for the
           process ID to kill [perl #75812].

       o   "UNIVERSAL::VERSION" no longer leaks memory.  It started leaking in
           Perl 5.10.0.

       o   The C-level "my_strftime" functions no longer leaks memory.  This
           fixes a memory leak in "POSIX::strftime" [perl #73520].

       o   "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].

       o   Passing to "index" an offset beyond the end of the string when the
           string is encoded internally in UTF8 no longer causes panics [perl
           #75898].

       o   Syntax errors in "(?{...})" blocks in regular expressions no longer
           cause panic messages [perl #2353].

       o   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].

Errata
   split() and @_
       split() no longer modifies @_ when called in scalar or void context.
       In void context it now produces a "Useless use of split" warning.  This
       is actually a change introduced in perl 5.12.0, but it was missed from
       that release's perl5120delta.

Acknowledgements
       Perl 5.12.5 represents approximately 17 months of development since
       Perl 5.12.4 and contains approximately 1,900 lines of changes across 64
       files from 18 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 5.12.5:

       Andy Dougherty, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, David
       Mitchell, Dominic Hargreaves, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz,
       George Greer, Goro Fuji, Jesse Vincent, Karl Williamson, Leon Brocard,
       Nicholas Clark, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes,
       Steve Hay, Tony Cook.

       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 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.

perl v5.30.0                      2023-11-23                  PERL5125DELTA(1)