perl5202delta - what is new for perl v5.20.2
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.
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.
- attributes has been upgraded from version 0.22 to 0.23.
The usage of "memEQs" in the
XS has been corrected. [perl #122701]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=122701>
- 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.
[perl #123096]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123096>
- 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. [perl #123443]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123443>
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.
perlunicook
This document, by Tom Christiansen, provides examples of handling
Unicode in Perl.
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. [perl #122661]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=122661>
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.
- 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.
- •
- The test script re/rt122747.t has been added to verify that perl
#122747 <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=122747> remains
fixed.
IRIX and Tru64 platforms are working again. (Some
"make test" failures remain.)
- AIX now sets the length in "getsockopt"
correctly. [perl #120835]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=120835>, [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.
[perl #123135]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123135>
- 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. [perl #122771]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=122771>
- 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. [perl #122747]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=122747>
- 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. [perl #123029]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123029>
- Fixed a bug that could cause perl to execute an infinite loop during
compilation. [perl #122995]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=122995>
- 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). [perl #40565]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=40565>
- Tainted constants evaluated at compile time no longer cause unrelated
statements to become tainted. [perl #122669]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=122669>
- 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. [perl #123245]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123245>
- 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. [perl #123410]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123410>
- 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. [perl
#123539] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123539>
- "qr/@array(?{block})/" no longer dies
with "Bizarre copy of ARRAY". [perl #123344]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123344>
- "gmtime" no longer crashes with
not-a-number values. [perl #123495]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123495>
- 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. [perl
#123542] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123542>
- A memory leak in some regular expressions, introduced in Perl 5.20.1, has
been fixed. [perl #123198]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123198>
- "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. [perl
#123538] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123538> [perl
#123622] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123622>
- A possible buffer overrun and crash when parsing a literal pattern during
regular expression compilation has been fixed. [perl #123604]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123604>
- •
- 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.
- •
- 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. [perl #122655]
<https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=122655>
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.
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.