perl5203delta - what is new for perl v5.20.3
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.
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.
- 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>
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).
- •
- 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>
- 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.
- 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>
- 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>
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 Mannsaaker, 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 PisaX, 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.
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.
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.