perl5142delta

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 Clement 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
       o   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".

       o   Encode has been upgraded from version 2.42 to 2.42_01.

           See "Security".

       o   File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.12 to version 1.13.

           See "Security".

       o   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
       o   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].

       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].

       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   "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].

       o   Localising a tied variable used to make it read-only if it
           contained a copy-on-write string.

       o   Elements of restricted hashes (see the fields pragma) containing
           copy-on-write values couldn't be deleted, nor could such hashes be
           cleared ("%hash = ()").

       o   Locking a hash element that is a glob copy no longer causes
           subsequent assignment to it to corrupt the glob.

       o   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.

       o   "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.

perl v5.30.0                      2023-11-23                  PERL5142DELTA(1)