perl5120delta - what is new for perl v5.12.0
This document describes differences between the 5.10.0 release and
the 5.12.0 release.
Many of the bug fixes in 5.12.0 are already included in the 5.10.1
maintenance release.
You can see the list of those changes in the 5.10.1 release notes
(perl5101delta).
This new syntax allows a module author to set the
$VERSION of a namespace when the namespace is
declared with 'package'. It eliminates the need for
"our $VERSION = ..." and similar
constructs. E.g.
package Foo::Bar 1.23;
# $Foo::Bar::VERSION == 1.23
There are several advantages to this:
- $VERSION is parsed in exactly the same way as
"use NAME VERSION"
- $VERSION is set at compile time
- $VERSION is a version object that provides proper
overloading of comparison operators so comparing
$VERSION to decimal (1.23) or dotted-decimal
(v1.2.3) version numbers works correctly.
- Eliminates "$VERSION = ..." and
"eval $VERSION" clutter
- As it requires VERSION to be a numeric literal or v-string literal, it can
be statically parsed by toolchain modules without
"eval" the way MM->parse_version does
for "$VERSION = ..."
It does not break old code with only
"package NAME", but code that uses
"package NAME VERSION" will need to be
restricted to perl 5.12.0 or newer This is analogous to the change to
"open" from two-args to three-args. Users
requiring the latest Perl will benefit, and perhaps after several years, it
will become a standard practice.
However, "package NAME VERSION"
requires a new, 'strict' version number format. See "Version number
formats" for details.
A new operator, "...", nicknamed
the Yada Yada operator, has been added. It is intended to mark placeholder
code that is not yet implemented. See "Yada Yada Operator" in
perlop.
Using the "use VERSION" syntax
with a version number greater or equal to 5.11.0 will lexically enable
strictures just like "use strict" would do
(in addition to enabling features.) The following:
use 5.12.0;
means:
use strict;
use feature ':5.12';
Perl 5.12 comes with Unicode 5.2, the latest version available to
us at the time of release. This version of Unicode was released in October
2009. See <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.2.0> for further
details about what's changed in this version of the standard. See
perlunicode for instructions on installing and using other versions of
Unicode.
Additionally, Perl's developers have significantly improved Perl's
Unicode implementation. For full details, see "Unicode overhaul"
below.
Perl's core time-related functions are now Y2038 compliant. (It
may not mean much to you, but your kids will love it!)
It is now possible to overload the
"qr//" operator, that is, conversion to
regexp, like it was already possible to overload conversion to boolean,
string or number of objects. It is invoked when an object appears on the
right hand side of the "=~" operator or
when it is interpolated into a regexp. See overload.
Extension modules can now cleanly hook into the Perl parser to
define new kinds of keyword-headed expression and compound statement. The
syntax following the keyword is defined entirely by the extension. This
allows a completely non-Perl sublanguage to be parsed inline, with the
correct ops cleanly generated.
See "PL_keyword_plugin" in perlapi for the mechanism.
The Perl core source distribution also includes a new module
XS::APItest::KeywordRPN, which implements reverse Polish notation arithmetic
via pluggable keywords. This module is mainly used for test purposes, and is
not normally installed, but also serves as an example of how to use the new
mechanism.
Perl's developers consider this feature to be experimental. We may
remove it or change it in a backwards-incompatible way in Perl 5.14.
The lowest layers of the lexer and parts of the pad system now
have C APIs available to XS extensions. These are necessary to support
proper use of pluggable keywords, but have other uses too. The new APIs are
experimental, and only cover a small proportion of what would be necessary
to take full advantage of the core's facilities in these areas. It is
intended that the Perl 5.13 development cycle will see the addition of a
full range of clean, supported interfaces.
Perl's developers consider this feature to be experimental. We may
remove it or change it in a backwards-incompatible way in Perl 5.14.
Where an extension module hooks the creation of rv2cv ops to
modify the subroutine lookup process, this now works correctly for bareword
subroutine calls. This means that prototypes on subroutines referenced this
way will be processed correctly. (Previously bareword subroutine names were
initially looked up, for parsing purposes, by an unhookable mechanism, so
extensions could only properly influence subroutine names that appeared with
an "&" sigil.)
As of Perl 5.12.0 there is a new interface for plugging and using
method resolution orders other than the default linear depth first search.
The C3 method resolution order added in 5.10.0 has been re-implemented as a
plugin, without changing its Perl-space interface. See perlmroapi for more
information.
Perl now supports "\N", a new
regex escape which you can think of as the inverse of
"\n". It will match any character that is
not a newline, independently from the presence or absence of the single line
match modifier "/s". It is not usable
within a character class. "\N{3}" means to
match 3 non-newlines; "\N{5,}" means to
match at least 5. "\N{NAME}" still means
the character or sequence named "NAME",
but "NAME" no longer can be things like
3, or "5,".
This will break a custom charnames translator which allows numbers
for character names, as "\N{3}" will now
mean to match 3 non-newline characters, and not the character whose name is
3. (No name defined by the Unicode standard is a
number, so only custom translators might be affected.)
Perl's developers are somewhat concerned about possible user
confusion with the existing "\N{...}"
construct which matches characters by their Unicode name. Consequently, this
feature is experimental. We may remove it or change it in a
backwards-incompatible way in Perl 5.14.
Perl now has some support for DTrace. See "DTrace
support" in INSTALL.
Both "CPAN" and
"CPANPLUS" now support the
"configure_requires" keyword in the
META.yml metadata file included in most recent CPAN distributions.
This allows distribution authors to specify configuration prerequisites that
must be installed before running Makefile.PL or Build.PL.
See the documentation for
"ExtUtils::MakeMaker" or
"Module::Build" for more on how to specify
"configure_requires" when creating a
distribution for CPAN.
The "each",
"keys",
"values" function can now operate on
arrays.
"when" is now allowed to be used
as a statement modifier.
The variable $, may now be tied.
// now behaves like || in when clauses
You can now set "-W" from the
"PERL5OPT" environment variable
"delete local" now allows you to
locally delete a hash entry.
Abstract namespace sockets are Linux-specific socket type that
live in AF_UNIX family, slightly abusing it to be able to use arbitrary
character arrays as addresses: They start with nul byte and are not
terminated by nul byte, but with the length passed to the socket()
system call.
The 32-bit limit on "substr"
arguments has now been removed. The full range of the system's signed and
unsigned integers is now available for the
"pos" and
"len" arguments.
Over the years, Perl's developers have deprecated a number of
language features for a variety of reasons. Perl now defaults to issuing a
warning if a deprecated language feature is used. Many of the deprecations
Perl now warns you about have been deprecated for many years. You can find a
list of what was deprecated in a given release of Perl in the
"perl5xxdelta.pod" file for that
release.
To disable this feature in a given lexical scope, you should use
"no warnings
'deprecated';" For information about which language features are
deprecated and explanations of various deprecation warnings, please see
perldiag. See "Deprecations" below for the list of features and
modules Perl's developers have deprecated as part of this release.
Acceptable version number formats have been formalized into
"strict" and "lax" rules. "package
NAME VERSION" takes a strict version number.
"UNIVERSAL::VERSION" and the version
object constructors take lax version numbers. Providing an invalid version
will result in a fatal error. The version argument in
"use NAME VERSION" is first parsed as a
numeric literal or v-string and then passed to
"UNIVERSAL::VERSION" (and must then pass
the "lax" format test).
These formats are documented fully in the version module. To a
first approximation, a "strict" version number is a positive
decimal number (integer or decimal-fraction) without exponentiation or else
a dotted-decimal v-string with a leading 'v' character and at least three
components. A "lax" version number allows v-strings with fewer
than three components or without a leading 'v'. Under "lax" rules,
both decimal and dotted-decimal versions may have a trailing
"alpha" component separated by an underscore character after a
fractional or dotted-decimal component.
The version module adds
"version::is_strict" and
"version::is_lax" functions to check a
scalar against these rules.
In @INC,
"ARCHLIB" and
"PRIVLIB" now occur after the current
version's "site_perl" and
"vendor_perl". Modules installed into
"site_perl" and
"vendor_perl" will now be loaded in
preference to those installed in "ARCHLIB"
and "PRIVLIB".
Internally, Perl now treats compiled regular expressions (such as
those created with "qr//") as first class
entities. Perl modules which serialize, deserialize or otherwise have deep
interaction with Perl's internal data structures need to be updated for this
change. Most affected CPAN modules have already been updated as of this
writing.
The
"given"/"when"
switch statement handles complex statements better than Perl 5.10.0 did
(These enhancements are also available in 5.10.1 and subsequent 5.10
releases.) There are two new cases where
"when" now interprets its argument as a
boolean, instead of an expression to be used in a smart match:
- flip-flop
operators
- The ".." and
"..." flip-flop operators are now
evaluated in boolean context, following their usual semantics; see
"Range Operators" in perlop.
Note that, as in perl 5.10.0, "when
(1..10)" will not work to test whether a given value is an
integer between 1 and 10; you should use "when
([1..10])" instead (note the array reference).
However, contrary to 5.10.0, evaluating the flip-flop
operators in boolean context ensures it can now be useful in a
"when()", notably for implementing
bistable conditions, like in:
when (/^=begin/ .. /^=end/) {
# do something
}
- defined-or
operator
- A compound expression involving the defined-or operator, as in
"when (expr1 // expr2)", will be treated
as boolean if the first expression is boolean. (This just extends the
existing rule that applies to the regular or operator, as in
"when (expr1 || expr2)".)
Since Perl 5.10.0, Perl's developers have made a number of changes
to the smart match operator. These, of course, also alter the behaviour of
the switch statements where smart matching is implicitly used. These changes
were also made for the 5.10.1 release, and will remain in subsequent 5.10
releases.
Changes to type-based dispatch
The smart match operator "~~" is
no longer commutative. The behaviour of a smart match now depends primarily
on the type of its right hand argument. Moreover, its semantics have been
adjusted for greater consistency or usefulness in several cases. While the
general backwards compatibility is maintained, several changes must be
noted:
- Code references with an empty prototype are no longer treated specially.
They are passed an argument like the other code references (even if they
choose to ignore it).
- "%hash ~~ sub {}" and
"@array ~~ sub {}" now test that the
subroutine returns a true value for each key of the hash (or element of
the array), instead of passing the whole hash or array as a reference to
the subroutine.
- Due to the commutativity breakage, code references are no longer treated
specially when appearing on the left of the
"~~" operator, but like any vulgar
scalar.
- "undef ~~ %hash" is always false (since
"undef" can't be a key in a hash). No
implicit conversion to "" is done (as
was the case in perl 5.10.0).
- "$scalar ~~ @array" now always
distributes the smart match across the elements of the array. It's true if
one element in @array verifies
"$scalar ~~ $element". This is a
generalization of the old behaviour that tested whether the array
contained the scalar.
The full dispatch table for the smart match operator is given in
"Smart matching in detail" in perlsyn.
Smart match and overloading
According to the rule of dispatch based on the rightmost argument
type, when an object overloading "~~"
appears on the right side of the operator, the overload routine will always
be called (with a 3rd argument set to a true value, see overload.) However,
when the object will appear on the left, the overload routine will be called
only when the rightmost argument is a simple scalar. This way,
distributivity of smart match across arrays is not broken, as well as the
other behaviours with complex types (coderefs, hashes, regexes). Thus,
writers of overloading routines for smart match mostly need to worry only
with comparing against a scalar, and possibly with stringification
overloading; the other common cases will be automatically handled
consistently.
"~~" will now refuse to work on
objects that do not overload it (in order to avoid relying on the object's
underlying structure). (However, if the object overloads the stringification
or the numification operators, and if overload fallback is active, it will
be used instead, as usual.)
- The definitions of a number of Unicode properties have changed to match
those of the current Unicode standard. These are listed above under
"Unicode overhaul". This change may break code that expects the
old definitions.
- The boolkeys op has moved to the group of hash ops. This breaks binary
compatibility.
- Filehandles are now always blessed into
"IO::File".
The previous behaviour was to bless Filehandles into
FileHandle (an empty proxy class) if it was loaded into memory and
otherwise to bless them into
"IO::Handle".
- The semantics of "use feature :5.10*"
have changed slightly. See "Modules and Pragmata" for more
information.
- Perl's developers now use git, rather than Perforce. This should be a
purely internal change only relevant to people actively working on the
core. However, you may see minor difference in perl as a consequence of
the change. For example in some of details of the output of
"perl -V". See
perlrepository for more information.
- As part of the "Test::Harness" 2.x to
3.x upgrade, the experimental
"Test::Harness::Straps" module has been
removed. See "Modules and Pragmata" for more details.
- As part of the "ExtUtils::MakeMaker"
upgrade, the
"ExtUtils::MakeMaker::bytes" and
"ExtUtils::MakeMaker::vmsish" modules
have been removed from this distribution.
- "Module::CoreList" no longer contains
the %:patchlevel hash.
- "length undef" now returns undef.
- Unsupported private C API functions are now declared "static" to
prevent leakage to Perl's public API.
- To support the bootstrapping process, miniperl no longer builds
with UTF-8 support in the regexp engine.
This allows a build to complete with PERL_UNICODE set and a
UTF-8 locale. Without this there's a bootstrapping problem, as miniperl
can't load the UTF-8 components of the regexp engine, because they're
not yet built.
- miniperl's @INC is now restricted to just
"-I...", the split of
$ENV{PERL5LIB}, and
"".""
- A space or a newline is now required after a "#line
XXX" directive.
- Tied filehandles now have an additional method EOF which provides the EOF
type.
- To better match all other flow control statements,
"foreach" may no longer be used as an
attribute.
- Perl's command-line switch "-P", which was deprecated in version
5.10.0, has now been removed. The CPAN module
"Filter::cpp" can be used as an
alternative.
From time to time, Perl's developers find it necessary to
deprecate features or modules we've previously shipped as part of the core
distribution. We are well aware of the pain and frustration that a
backwards-incompatible change to Perl can cause for developers building or
maintaining software in Perl. You can be sure that when we deprecate a
functionality or syntax, it isn't a choice we make lightly. Sometimes, we
choose to deprecate functionality or syntax because it was found to be
poorly designed or implemented. Sometimes, this is because they're holding
back other features or causing performance problems. Sometimes, the reasons
are more complex. Wherever possible, we try to keep deprecated functionality
available to developers in its previous form for at least one major release.
So long as a deprecated feature isn't actively disrupting our ability to
maintain and extend Perl, we'll try to leave it in place as long as
possible.
The following items are now deprecated:
- suidperl
- "suidperl" is no longer part of Perl. It
used to provide a mechanism to emulate setuid permission bits on systems
that don't support it properly.
- Use of ":=" to mean an
empty attribute list
- An accident of Perl's parser meant that these constructions were all
equivalent:
my $pi := 4;
my $pi : = 4;
my $pi : = 4;
with the ":" being treated
as the start of an attribute list, which ends before the
"=". As whitespace is not significant
here, all are parsed as an empty attribute list, hence all the above are
equivalent to, and better written as
my $pi = 4;
because no attribute processing is done for an empty list.
As is, this meant that ":="
cannot be used as a new token, without silently changing the meaning of
existing code. Hence that particular form is now deprecated, and will
become a syntax error. If it is absolutely necessary to have empty
attribute lists (for example, because of a code generator) then avoid
the warning by adding a space before the
"=".
- "UNIVERSAL->import()"
- The method "UNIVERSAL->import()" is
now deprecated. Attempting to pass import arguments to a
"use UNIVERSAL" statement will result in
a deprecation warning.
- Use of "goto" to
jump into a construct
- Using "goto" to jump from an outer scope
into an inner scope is now deprecated. This rare use case was causing
problems in the implementation of scopes.
- Custom character names in
\N{name} that don't look like names
- In
"\N{name}",
name can be just about anything. The standard Unicode names have a
very limited domain, but a custom name translator could create names that
are, for example, made up entirely of punctuation symbols. It is now
deprecated to make names that don't begin with an alphabetic character,
and aren't alphanumeric or contain other than a very few other characters,
namely spaces, dashes, parentheses and colons. Because of the added
meaning of "\N" (See
""\N" experimental
regex escape"), names that look like curly brace -enclosed
quantifiers won't work. For example,
"\N{3,4}" now means to match 3 to 4
non-newlines; before a custom name "3,4"
could have been created.
- Deprecated
Modules
- The following modules will be removed from the core distribution in a
future release, and should be installed from CPAN instead. Distributions
on CPAN which require these should add them to their prerequisites. The
core versions of these modules warnings will issue a deprecation warning.
If you ship a packaged version of Perl, either alone or as
part of a larger system, then you should carefully consider the
repercussions of core module deprecations. You may want to consider
shipping your default build of Perl with packages for some or all
deprecated modules which install into
"vendor" or
"site" perl library directories. This
will inhibit the deprecation warnings.
Alternatively, you may want to consider patching
lib/deprecate.pm to provide deprecation warnings specific to your
packaging system or distribution of Perl, consistent with how your
packaging system or distribution manages a staged transition from a
release where the installation of a single package provides the given
functionality, to a later release where the system administrator needs
to know to install multiple packages to get that same functionality.
You can silence these deprecation warnings by installing the
modules in question from CPAN. To install the latest version of all of
them, just install
"Task::Deprecations::5_12".
- Class::ISA
- Pod::Plainer
- Shell
- Switch
- Switch is buggy and should be avoided. You may find Perl's new
"given"/"when"
feature a suitable replacement. See "Switch statements" in
perlsyn for more information.
- Assignment to
$[
- Use of the attribute :locked
on subroutines
- Use of "locked"
with the attributes pragma
- Use of "unique"
with the attributes pragma
- Perl_pmflag
- "Perl_pmflag" is no longer part of
Perl's public API. Calling it now generates a deprecation warning, and it
will be removed in a future release. Although listed as part of the API,
it was never documented, and only ever used in toke.c, and prior to
5.10, regcomp.c. In core, it has been replaced by a static
function.
- Numerous Perl 4-era
libraries
- termcap.pl, tainted.pl, stat.pl,
shellwords.pl, pwd.pl, open3.pl, open2.pl,
newgetopt.pl, look.pl, find.pl, finddepth.pl,
importenv.pl, hostname.pl, getopts.pl,
getopt.pl, getcwd.pl, flush.pl, fastcwd.pl,
exceptions.pl, ctime.pl, complete.pl,
cacheout.pl, bigrat.pl, bigint.pl,
bigfloat.pl, assert.pl, abbrev.pl, dotsh.pl,
and timelocal.pl are all now deprecated. Earlier, Perl's developers
intended to remove these libraries from Perl's core for the 5.14.0
release.
During final testing before the release of 5.12.0, several
developers discovered current production code using these ancient
libraries, some inside the Perl core itself. Accordingly, the pumpking
granted them a stay of execution. They will begin to warn about their
deprecation in the 5.14.0 release and will be removed in the 5.16.0
release.
Perl's developers have made a concerted effort to update Perl to
be in sync with the latest Unicode standard. Changes for this include:
Perl can now handle every Unicode character property. New
documentation, perluniprops, lists all available non-Unihan character
properties. By default, perl does not expose Unihan, deprecated or
Unicode-internal properties. See below for more details on these; there is
also a section in the pod listing them, and explaining why they are not
exposed.
Perl now fully supports the Unicode compound-style of using
"=" and
":" in writing regular expressions:
"\p{property=value}" and
"\p{property:value}" (both of which mean
the same thing).
Perl now fully supports the Unicode loose matching rules for text
between the braces in "\p{...}"
constructs. In addition, Perl allows underscores between digits of
numbers.
Perl now accepts all the Unicode-defined synonyms for properties
and property values.
"qr/\X/", which matches a
Unicode logical character, has been expanded to work better with various
Asian languages. It now is defined as an extended grapheme cluster.
(See <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/>). Anything matched
previously and that made sense will continue to be accepted.
Additionally:
- "\X" will not break apart a
"CR LF" sequence.
- "\X" will now match a sequence which
includes the "ZWJ" and
"ZWNJ" characters.
- "\X" will now always match at least one
character, including an initial mark. Marks generally come after a base
character, but it is possible in Unicode to have them in isolation, and
"\X" will now handle that case, for
example at the beginning of a line, or after a
"ZWSP". And this is the part where
"\X" doesn't match the things that it
used to that don't make sense. Formerly, for example, you could have the
nonsensical case of an accented LF.
- "\X" will now match a (Korean) Hangul
syllable sequence, and the Thai and Lao exception cases.
Otherwise, this change should be transparent for the non-affected
languages.
"\p{...}" matches using the
Canonical_Combining_Class property were completely broken in previous
releases of Perl. They should now work correctly.
Before Perl 5.12, the Unicode
"Decomposition_Type=Compat" property and a
Perl extension had the same name, which led to neither matching all the
correct values (with more than 100 mistakes in one, and several thousand in
the other). The Perl extension has now been renamed to be
"Decomposition_Type=Noncanonical" (short:
"dt=noncanon"). It has the same meaning as
was previously intended, namely the union of all the non-canonical
Decomposition types, with Unicode "Compat"
being just one of those.
"\p{Decomposition_Type=Canonical}"
now includes the Hangul syllables.
"\p{Uppercase}" and
"\p{Lowercase}" now work as the Unicode
standard says they should. This means they each match a few more characters
than they used to.
"\p{Cntrl}" now matches the same
characters as "\p{Control}". This means it
no longer will match Private Use (gc=co), Surrogates (gc=cs), nor Format
(gc=cf) code points. The Format code points represent the biggest possible
problem. All but 36 of them are either officially deprecated or strongly
discouraged from being used. Of those 36, likely the most widely used are
the soft hyphen (U+00AD), and BOM, ZWSP, ZWNJ, WJ, and similar characters,
plus bidirectional controls.
"\p{Alpha}" now matches the same
characters as "\p{Alphabetic}". Before
5.12, Perl's definition included a number of things that aren't really alpha
(all marks) while omitting many that were. The definitions of
"\p{Alnum}" and
"\p{Word}" depend on Alpha's definition
and have changed accordingly.
"\p{Word}" no longer incorrectly
matches non-word characters such as fractions.
"\p{Print}" no longer matches
the line control characters: Tab, LF, CR, FF, VT, and NEL. This brings it in
line with standards and the documentation.
"\p{XDigit}" now matches the
same characters as "\p{Hex_Digit}". This
means that in addition to the characters it currently matches,
"[A-Fa-f0-9]", it will also match the 22
fullwidth equivalents, for example U+FF10: FULLWIDTH DIGIT ZERO.
The Numeric type property has been extended to include the Unihan
characters.
There is a new Perl extension, the 'Present_In', or simply 'In',
property. This is an extension of the Unicode Age property, but
"\p{In=5.0}" matches any code point whose
usage has been determined as of Unicode version 5.0. The
"\p{Age=5.0}" only matches code points
added in precisely version 5.0.
A number of properties now have the correct values for unassigned
code points. The affected properties are Bidi_Class, East_Asian_Width,
Joining_Type, Decomposition_Type, Hangul_Syllable_Type, Numeric_Type, and
Line_Break.
The Default_Ignorable_Code_Point, ID_Continue, and ID_Start
properties are now up to date with current Unicode definitions.
Earlier versions of Perl erroneously exposed certain properties
that are supposed to be Unicode internal-only. Use of these in regular
expressions will now generate, if enabled, a deprecation warning message.
The properties are: Other_Alphabetic, Other_Default_Ignorable_Code_Point,
Other_Grapheme_Extend, Other_ID_Continue, Other_ID_Start, Other_Lowercase,
Other_Math, and Other_Uppercase.
It is now possible to change which Unicode properties Perl
understands on a per-installation basis. As mentioned above, certain
properties are turned off by default. These include all the Unihan
properties (which should be accessible via the CPAN module Unicode::Unihan)
and any deprecated or Unicode internal-only property that Perl has never
exposed.
The generated files in the
"lib/unicore/To" directory are now more
clearly marked as being stable, directly usable by applications. New hash
entries in them give the format of the normal entries, which allows for
easier machine parsing. Perl can generate files in this directory for any
property, though most are suppressed. You can find instructions for changing
which are written in perluniprops.
- "autodie"
- "autodie" is a new lexically-scoped
alternative for the "Fatal" module. The
bundled version is 2.06_01. Note that in this release, using a string eval
when "autodie" is in effect can cause
the autodie behaviour to leak into the surrounding scope. See
"BUGS" in autodie for more details.
Version 2.06_01 has been added to the Perl core.
- "Compress::Raw::Bzip2"
- Version 2.024 has been added to the Perl core.
- "overloading"
- "overloading" allows you to lexically
disable or enable overloading for some or all operations.
Version 0.001 has been added to the Perl core.
- "parent"
- "parent" establishes an ISA relationship
with base classes at compile time. It provides the key feature of
"base" without further unwanted
behaviors.
Version 0.223 has been added to the Perl core.
- "Parse::CPAN::Meta"
- Version 1.40 has been added to the Perl core.
- "VMS::DCLsym"
- Version 1.03 has been added to the Perl core.
- "VMS::Stdio"
- Version 2.4 has been added to the Perl core.
- "XS::APItest::KeywordRPN"
- Version 0.003 has been added to the Perl core.
- "base"
- Upgraded from version 2.13 to 2.15.
- "bignum"
- Upgraded from version 0.22 to 0.23.
- "charnames"
- "charnames" now contains the Unicode
NameAliases.txt database file. This has the effect of adding some
extra "\N" character names that formerly
wouldn't have been recognised; for example,
"\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER
GHA}".
Upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.07.
- "constant"
- Upgraded from version 1.13 to 1.20.
- "diagnostics"
- "diagnostics" now supports %.0f
formatting internally.
"diagnostics" no longer
suppresses "Use of uninitialized value in
range (or flip)" warnings. [perl
#71204]
Upgraded from version 1.17 to 1.19.
- "feature"
- In "feature", the meaning of the
":5.10" and
":5.10.X" feature bundles has changed
slightly. The last component, if any (i.e.
"X") is simply ignored. This is
predicated on the assumption that new features will not, in general, be
added to maintenance releases. So
":5.10" and
":5.10.X" have identical effect. This is
a change to the behaviour documented for 5.10.0.
"feature" now includes the
"unicode_strings" feature:
use feature "unicode_strings";
This pragma turns on Unicode semantics for the case-changing
operations ("uc",
"lc",
"ucfirst",
"lcfirst") on strings that don't have
the internal UTF-8 flag set, but that contain single-byte characters
between 128 and 255.
Upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.16.
- "less"
- "less" now includes the
"stash_name" method to allow subclasses
of "less" to pick where in %^H to store
their stash.
Upgraded from version 0.02 to 0.03.
- "lib"
- Upgraded from version 0.5565 to 0.62.
- "mro"
- "mro" is now implemented as an XS
extension. The documented interface has not changed. Code relying on the
implementation detail that some "mro::"
methods happened to be available at all times gets to "keep both
pieces".
Upgraded from version 1.00 to 1.02.
- "overload"
- "overload" now allow overloading of
'qr'.
Upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.10.
- "threads"
- Upgraded from version 1.67 to 1.75.
- "threads::shared"
- Upgraded from version 1.14 to 1.32.
- "version"
- "version" now has support for
"Version number formats" as described earlier in this document
and in its own documentation.
Upgraded from version 0.74 to 0.82.
- "warnings"
- "warnings" has a new
"warnings::fatal_enabled()" function. It
also includes a new "illegalproto"
warning category. See also "New or Changed Diagnostics" for this
change.
Upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.09.
- "Archive::Extract"
- Upgraded from version 0.24 to 0.38.
- "Archive::Tar"
- Upgraded from version 1.38 to 1.54.
- "Attribute::Handlers"
- Upgraded from version 0.79 to 0.87.
- "AutoLoader"
- Upgraded from version 5.63 to 5.70.
- "B::Concise"
- Upgraded from version 0.74 to 0.78.
- "B::Debug"
- Upgraded from version 1.05 to 1.12.
- "B::Deparse"
- Upgraded from version 0.83 to 0.96.
- "B::Lint"
- Upgraded from version 1.09 to 1.11_01.
- "CGI"
- Upgraded from version 3.29 to 3.48.
- "Class::ISA"
- Upgraded from version 0.33 to 0.36.
NOTE: "Class::ISA" is
deprecated and may be removed from a future version of Perl.
- "Compress::Raw::Zlib"
- Upgraded from version 2.008 to 2.024.
- "CPAN"
- Upgraded from version 1.9205 to 1.94_56.
- "CPANPLUS"
- Upgraded from version 0.84 to 0.90.
- "CPANPLUS::Dist::Build"
- Upgraded from version 0.06_02 to 0.46.
- "Data::Dumper"
- Upgraded from version 2.121_14 to 2.125.
- "DB_File"
- Upgraded from version 1.816_1 to 1.820.
- "Devel::PPPort"
- Upgraded from version 3.13 to 3.19.
- "Digest"
- Upgraded from version 1.15 to 1.16.
- "Digest::MD5"
- Upgraded from version 2.36_01 to 2.39.
- "Digest::SHA"
- Upgraded from version 5.45 to 5.47.
- "Encode"
- Upgraded from version 2.23 to 2.39.
- "Exporter"
- Upgraded from version 5.62 to 5.64_01.
- "ExtUtils::CBuilder"
- Upgraded from version 0.21 to 0.27.
- "ExtUtils::Command"
- Upgraded from version 1.13 to 1.16.
- "ExtUtils::Constant"
- Upgraded from version 0.2 to 0.22.
- "ExtUtils::Install"
- Upgraded from version 1.44 to 1.55.
- "ExtUtils::MakeMaker"
- Upgraded from version 6.42 to 6.56.
- "ExtUtils::Manifest"
- Upgraded from version 1.51_01 to 1.57.
- "ExtUtils::ParseXS"
- Upgraded from version 2.18_02 to 2.21.
- "File::Fetch"
- Upgraded from version 0.14 to 0.24.
- "File::Path"
- Upgraded from version 2.04 to 2.08_01.
- "File::Temp"
- Upgraded from version 0.18 to 0.22.
- "Filter::Simple"
- Upgraded from version 0.82 to 0.84.
- "Filter::Util::Call"
- Upgraded from version 1.07 to 1.08.
- "Getopt::Long"
- Upgraded from version 2.37 to 2.38.
- "IO"
- Upgraded from version 1.23_01 to 1.25_02.
- "IO::Zlib"
- Upgraded from version 1.07 to 1.10.
- "IPC::Cmd"
- Upgraded from version 0.40_1 to 0.54.
- "IPC::SysV"
- Upgraded from version 1.05 to 2.01.
- "Locale::Maketext"
- Upgraded from version 1.12 to 1.14.
- "Locale::Maketext::Simple"
- Upgraded from version 0.18 to 0.21.
- "Log::Message"
- Upgraded from version 0.01 to 0.02.
- "Log::Message::Simple"
- Upgraded from version 0.04 to 0.06.
- "Math::BigInt"
- Upgraded from version 1.88 to 1.89_01.
- "Math::BigInt::FastCalc"
- Upgraded from version 0.16 to 0.19.
- "Math::BigRat"
- Upgraded from version 0.21 to 0.24.
- "Math::Complex"
- Upgraded from version 1.37 to 1.56.
- "Memoize"
- Upgraded from version 1.01_02 to 1.01_03.
- "MIME::Base64"
- Upgraded from version 3.07_01 to 3.08.
- "Module::Build"
- Upgraded from version 0.2808_01 to 0.3603.
- "Module::CoreList"
- Upgraded from version 2.12 to 2.29.
- "Module::Load"
- Upgraded from version 0.12 to 0.16.
- "Module::Load::Conditional"
- Upgraded from version 0.22 to 0.34.
- "Module::Loaded"
- Upgraded from version 0.01 to 0.06.
- "Module::Pluggable"
- Upgraded from version 3.6 to 3.9.
- "Net::Ping"
- Upgraded from version 2.33 to 2.36.
- "NEXT"
- Upgraded from version 0.60_01 to 0.64.
- "Object::Accessor"
- Upgraded from version 0.32 to 0.36.
- "Package::Constants"
- Upgraded from version 0.01 to 0.02.
- "PerlIO"
- Upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.06.
- "Pod::Parser"
- Upgraded from version 1.35 to 1.37.
- "Pod::Perldoc"
- Upgraded from version 3.14_02 to 3.15_02.
- "Pod::Plainer"
- Upgraded from version 0.01 to 1.02.
NOTE: "Pod::Plainer" is
deprecated and may be removed from a future version of Perl.
- "Pod::Simple"
- Upgraded from version 3.05 to 3.13.
- "Safe"
- Upgraded from version 2.12 to 2.22.
- "SelfLoader"
- Upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.17.
- "Storable"
- Upgraded from version 2.18 to 2.22.
- "Switch"
- Upgraded from version 2.13 to 2.16.
NOTE: "Switch" is deprecated
and may be removed from a future version of Perl.
- "Sys::Syslog"
- Upgraded from version 0.22 to 0.27.
- "Term::ANSIColor"
- Upgraded from version 1.12 to 2.02.
- "Term::UI"
- Upgraded from version 0.18 to 0.20.
- "Test"
- Upgraded from version 1.25 to 1.25_02.
- "Test::Harness"
- Upgraded from version 2.64 to 3.17.
- "Test::Simple"
- Upgraded from version 0.72 to 0.94.
- "Text::Balanced"
- Upgraded from version 2.0.0 to 2.02.
- "Text::ParseWords"
- Upgraded from version 3.26 to 3.27.
- "Text::Soundex"
- Upgraded from version 3.03 to 3.03_01.
- "Thread::Queue"
- Upgraded from version 2.00 to 2.11.
- "Thread::Semaphore"
- Upgraded from version 2.01 to 2.09.
- "Tie::RefHash"
- Upgraded from version 1.37 to 1.38.
- "Time::HiRes"
- Upgraded from version 1.9711 to 1.9719.
- "Time::Local"
- Upgraded from version 1.18 to 1.1901_01.
- "Time::Piece"
- Upgraded from version 1.12 to 1.15.
- "Unicode::Collate"
- Upgraded from version 0.52 to 0.52_01.
- "Unicode::Normalize"
- Upgraded from version 1.02 to 1.03.
- "Win32"
- Upgraded from version 0.34 to 0.39.
- "Win32API::File"
- Upgraded from version 0.1001_01 to 0.1101.
- "XSLoader"
- Upgraded from version 0.08 to 0.10.
- "attrs"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 1.02.
- "CPAN::API::HOWTO"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 'undef'.
- "CPAN::DeferedCode"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 5.50.
- "CPANPLUS::inc"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 'undef'.
- "DCLsym"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 1.03.
- "ExtUtils::MakeMaker::bytes"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 6.42.
- "ExtUtils::MakeMaker::vmsish"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 6.42.
- "Stdio"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 2.3.
- "Test::Harness::Assert"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 0.02.
- "Test::Harness::Iterator"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 0.02.
- "Test::Harness::Point"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 0.01.
- "Test::Harness::Results"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 0.01.
- "Test::Harness::Straps"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 0.26_01.
- "Test::Harness::Util"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 0.01.
- "XSSymSet"
- Removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 1.1.
See "Deprecated Modules" above.
- perlhaiku contains instructions on how to build perl for the Haiku
platform.
- perlmroapi describes the new interface for pluggable Method Resolution
Orders.
- perlperf, by Richard Foley, provides an introduction to the use of
performance and optimization techniques which can be used with particular
reference to perl programs.
- perlrepository describes how to access the perl source using the
git version control system.
- perlpolicy extends the "Social contract about contributed
modules" into the beginnings of a document on Perl porting
policies.
- The various large Changes* files (which listed every change made to
perl over the last 18 years) have been removed, and replaced by a small
file, also called Changes, which just explains how that same
information may be extracted from the git version control system.
- Porting/patching.pod has been deleted, as it mainly described
interacting with the old Perforce-based repository, which is now obsolete.
Information still relevant has been moved to perlrepository.
- The syntax "unless (EXPR) BLOCK else
BLOCK" is now documented as valid, as is the syntax
"unless (EXPR) BLOCK elsif (EXPR) BLOCK ...
else BLOCK", although actually using
the latter may not be the best idea for the readability of your source
code.
- Documented -X overloading.
- Documented that "when()" treats
specially most of the filetest operators
- Documented "when" as a syntax
modifier.
- Eliminated "Old Perl threads tutorial", which described 5005
threads.
pod/perlthrtut.pod is the same material reworked for
ithreads.
- Correct previous documentation: v-strings are not deprecated
With version objects, we need them to use MODULE VERSION
syntax. This patch removes the deprecation notice.
- Security contact information is now part of perlsec.
- A significant fraction of the core documentation has been updated to
clarify the behavior of Perl's Unicode handling.
Much of the remaining core documentation has been reviewed and
edited for clarity, consistent use of language, and to fix the spelling
of Tom Christiansen's name.
- The Pod specification (perlpodspec) has been updated to bring the
specification in line with modern usage already supported by most Pod
systems. A parameter string may now follow the format name in a
"begin/end" region. Links to URIs with a text description are
now allowed. The usage of
"L<"section">" has been
marked as deprecated.
- if.pm has been documented in "use" in perlfunc as a means to get
conditional loading of modules despite the implicit BEGIN block around
"use".
- The documentation for $1 in perlvar.pod has been
clarified.
- "\N{U+code
point}" is now documented.
- A new internal cache means that "isa()"
will often be faster.
- The implementation of "C3" Method
Resolution Order has been optimised - linearisation for classes with
single inheritance is 40% faster. Performance for multiple inheritance is
unchanged.
- Under "use locale", the locale-relevant
information is now cached on read-only values, such as the list returned
by "keys %hash". This makes operations
such as "sort keys %hash" in the scope
of "use locale" much faster.
- Empty "DESTROY" methods are no longer
called.
- "Perl_sv_utf8_upgrade()" is now
faster.
- "keys" on empty hash is now faster.
- "if (%foo)" has been optimized to be
faster than "if (keys %foo)".
- The string repetition operator ("$str x
$num") is now several times faster when
$str has length one or
$num is large.
- Reversing an array to itself (as in "@a = reverse
@a") in void context now happens in-place and is several
orders of magnitude faster than it used to be. It will also preserve
non-existent elements whenever possible, i.e. for non magical arrays or
tied arrays with "EXISTS" and
"DELETE" methods.
- perlapi, perlintern, perlmodlib and perltoc are now all generated at build
time, rather than being shipped as part of the release.
- If "vendorlib" and
"vendorarch" are the same, then they are
only added to @INC once.
- $Config{usedevel} and the C-level
"PERL_USE_DEVEL" are now defined if perl
is built with "-Dusedevel".
- Configure will enable use of
"-fstack-protector", to provide
protection against stack-smashing attacks, if the compiler supports
it.
- Configure will now determine the correct prototypes for re-entrant
functions and for "gconvert" if you are
using a C++ compiler rather than a C compiler.
- On Unix, if you build from a tree containing a git repository, the
configuration process will note the commit hash you have checked out, for
display in the output of "perl -v" and
"perl -V". Unpushed local commits are
automatically added to the list of local patches displayed by
"perl -V".
- Perl now supports SystemTap's "dtrace"
compatibility layer and an issue with linking
"miniperl" has been fixed in the
process.
- perldoc now uses "less -R" instead of
"less" for improved behaviour in the
face of "groff"'s new usage of ANSI
escape codes.
- "perl -V" now reports use of the
compile-time options "USE_PERL_ATOF" and
"USE_ATTRIBUTES_FOR_PERLIO".
- As part of the flattening of ext, all extensions on all platforms
are built by make_ext.pl. This replaces the Unix-specific
ext/util/make_ext, VMS-specific make_ext.com and
Win32-specific win32/buildext.pl.
Each release of Perl sees numerous internal changes which
shouldn't affect day to day usage but may still be notable for developers
working with Perl's source code.
- The J.R.R. Tolkien quotes at the head of C source file have been checked
and proper citations added, thanks to a patch from Tom Christiansen.
- The internal structure of the dual-life modules traditionally found in the
lib/ and ext/ directories in the perl source has changed
significantly. Where possible, dual-lifed modules have been extracted from
lib/ and ext/.
Dual-lifed modules maintained by Perl's developers as part of
the Perl core now live in dist/. Dual-lifed modules maintained
primarily on CPAN now live in cpan/. When reporting a bug in a
module located under cpan/, please send your bug report directly
to the module's bug tracker or author, rather than Perl's bug
tracker.
- "\N{...}" now compiles better, always
forces UTF-8 internal representation
Perl's developers have fixed several problems with the
recognition of "\N{...}" constructs.
As part of this, perl will store any scalar or regex containing
"\N{name}"
or "\N{U+code
point}" in its definition in
UTF-8 format. (This was true previously for all occurrences of
"\N{name}"
that did not use a custom translator, but now it's always true.)
- Perl_magic_setmglob now knows about globs, fixing RT #71254.
- "SVt_RV" no longer exists. RVs are now
stored in IVs.
- "Perl_vcroak()" now accepts a null first
argument. In addition, a full audit was made of the "not NULL"
compiler annotations, and those for several other internal functions were
corrected.
- New macros "dSAVEDERRNO",
"dSAVE_ERRNO",
"SAVE_ERRNO",
"RESTORE_ERRNO" have been added to
formalise the temporary saving of the
"errno" variable.
- The function "Perl_sv_insert_flags" has
been added to augment
"Perl_sv_insert".
- The function "Perl_newSV_type(type)" has
been added, equivalent to "Perl_newSV()"
followed by
"Perl_sv_upgrade(type)".
- The function "Perl_newSVpvn_flags()" has
been added, equivalent to
"Perl_newSVpvn()" and then performing
the action relevant to the flag.
Two flag bits are currently supported.
- "SVf_UTF8" will call
"SvUTF8_on()" for you. (Note that this
does not convert a sequence of ISO 8859-1 characters to UTF-8). A wrapper,
"newSVpvn_utf8()" is available for
this.
- "SVs_TEMP" now calls
"Perl_sv_2mortal()" on the new SV.
There is also a wrapper that takes constant strings,
"newSVpvs_flags()".
- The function "Perl_croak_xs_usage" has
been added as a wrapper to
"Perl_croak".
- Perl now exports the functions
"PerlIO_find_layer" and
"PerlIO_list_alloc".
- "PL_na" has been exterminated from the
core code, replaced by local STRLEN temporaries, or
"*_nolen()" calls. Either approach is
faster than "PL_na", which is a pointer
dereference into the interpreter structure under ithreads, and a global
variable otherwise.
- "Perl_mg_free()" used to leave freed
memory accessible via "SvMAGIC()" on the
scalar. It now updates the linked list to remove each piece of magic as it
is freed.
- Under ithreads, the regex in
"PL_reg_curpm" is now reference counted.
This eliminates a lot of hackish workarounds to cope with it not being
reference counted.
- "Perl_mg_magical()" would sometimes
incorrectly turn on "SvRMAGICAL()". This
has been fixed.
- The public IV and NV flags are now not set if the string value has
trailing "garbage". This behaviour is consistent with not
setting the public IV or NV flags if the value is out of range for the
type.
- Uses of "Nullav",
"Nullcv",
"Nullhv",
"Nullop",
"Nullsv" etc have been replaced by
"NULL" in the core code, and
non-dual-life modules, as "NULL" is
clearer to those unfamiliar with the core code.
- A macro MUTABLE_PTR(p) has been added, which on
(non-pedantic) gcc will not cast away
"const", returning a
"void *". Macros
"MUTABLE_SV(av)",
"MUTABLE_SV(cv)" etc build on this,
casting to "AV *" etc without casting
away "const". This allows proper
compile-time auditing of "const"
correctness in the core, and helped picked up some errors (now
fixed).
- Macros "mPUSHs()" and
"mXPUSHs()" have been added, for pushing
SVs on the stack and mortalizing them.
- Use of the private structure "mro_meta"
has changed slightly. Nothing outside the core should be accessing this
directly anyway.
- A new tool, Porting/expand-macro.pl has been added, that allows you
to view how a C preprocessor macro would be expanded when compiled. This
is handy when trying to decode the macro hell that is the perl guts.
- Parallel
tests
- The core distribution can now run its regression tests in parallel on
Unix-like platforms. Instead of running "make
test", set "TEST_JOBS" in
your environment to the number of tests to run in parallel, and run
"make test_harness". On a Bourne-like
shell, this can be done as
TEST_JOBS=3 make test_harness # Run 3 tests in parallel
An environment variable is used, rather than parallel make
itself, because TAP::Harness needs to be able to schedule individual
non-conflicting test scripts itself, and there is no standard interface
to "make" utilities to interact with
their job schedulers.
Note that currently some test scripts may fail when run in
parallel (most notably
"ext/IO/t/io_dir.t"). If necessary run
just the failing scripts again sequentially and see if the failures go
away.
- Test harness
flexibility
- It's now possible to override "PERL5OPT"
and friends in t/TEST
- Test watchdog
- Several tests that have the potential to hang forever if they fail now
incorporate a "watchdog" functionality that will kill them after
a timeout, which helps ensure that "make
test" and "make
test_harness" run to completion automatically.
Perl's developers have added a number of new tests to the core. In
addition to the items listed below, many modules updated from CPAN
incorporate new tests.
- Significant cleanups to core tests to ensure that language and interpreter
features are not used before they're tested.
- "make test_porting" now runs a number of
important pre-commit checks which might be of use to anyone working on the
Perl core.
- t/porting/podcheck.t automatically checks the well-formedness of
POD found in all .pl, .pm and .pod files in the MANIFEST, other
than in dual-lifed modules which are primarily maintained outside the Perl
core.
- t/porting/manifest.t now tests that all files listed in MANIFEST
are present.
- t/op/while_readdir.t tests that a bare readdir in while loop sets
$_.
- t/comp/retainedlines.t checks that the debugger can retain source
lines from "eval".
- t/io/perlio_fail.t checks that bad layers fail.
- t/io/perlio_leaks.t checks that PerlIO layers are not leaking.
- t/io/perlio_open.t checks that certain special forms of open
work.
- t/io/perlio.t includes general PerlIO tests.
- t/io/pvbm.t checks that there is no unexpected interaction between
the internal types "PVBM" and
"PVGV".
- t/mro/package_aliases.t checks that mro works properly in the
presence of aliased packages.
- t/op/dbm.t tests "dbmopen" and
"dbmclose".
- t/op/index_thr.t tests the interaction of
"index" and threads.
- t/op/pat_thr.t tests the interaction of esoteric patterns and
threads.
- t/op/qr_gc.t tests that "qr"
doesn't leak.
- t/op/reg_email_thr.t tests the interaction of regex recursion and
threads.
- t/op/regexp_qr_embed_thr.t tests the interaction of patterns with
embedded "qr//" and threads.
- t/op/regexp_unicode_prop.t tests Unicode properties in regular
expressions.
- t/op/regexp_unicode_prop_thr.t tests the interaction of Unicode
properties and threads.
- t/op/reg_nc_tie.t tests the tied methods of
"Tie::Hash::NamedCapture".
- t/op/reg_posixcc.t checks that POSIX character classes behave
consistently.
- t/op/re.t checks that exportable
"re" functions in universal.c
work.
- t/op/setpgrpstack.t checks that
"setpgrp" works.
- t/op/substr_thr.t tests the interaction of
"substr" and threads.
- t/op/upgrade.t checks that upgrading and assigning scalars
works.
- t/uni/lex_utf8.t checks that Unicode in the lexer works.
- t/uni/tie.t checks that Unicode and
"tie" work.
- t/comp/final_line_num.t tests whether line numbers are correct at
EOF
- t/comp/form_scope.t tests format scoping.
- t/comp/line_debug.t tests whether
"@{"_<$file"}" works.
- t/op/filetest_t.t tests if -t file test works.
- t/op/qr.t tests "qr".
- t/op/utf8cache.t tests malfunctions of the utf8 cache.
- t/re/uniprops.t test unicodes
"\p{}" regex constructs.
- t/op/filehandle.t tests some suitably portable filetest operators
to check that they work as expected, particularly in the light of some
internal changes made in how filehandles are blessed.
- t/op/time_loop.t tests that unix times greater than
"2**63", which can now be handed to
"gmtime" and
"localtime", do not cause an internal
overflow or an excessively long loop.
- SV allocation tracing has been added to the diagnostics enabled by
"-Dm". The tracing can alternatively
output via the "PERL_MEM_LOG" mechanism,
if that was enabled when the perl binary was compiled.
- Smartmatch resolution tracing has been added as a new diagnostic. Use
"-DM" to enable it.
- A new debugging flag "-DB" now dumps
subroutine definitions, leaving "-Dx"
for its original purpose of dumping syntax trees.
- Perl 5.12 provides a number of new diagnostic messages to help you write
better code. See perldiag for details of these new messages.
- "Bad plugin affecting keyword '%s'"
- "gmtime(%.0f) too large"
- "Lexing code attempted to stuff non-Latin-1
character into Latin-1 input"
- "Lexing code internal error (%s)"
- "localtime(%.0f) too large"
- "Overloaded dereference did not return a
reference"
- "Overloaded qr did not return a
REGEXP"
- "Perl_pmflag() is deprecated, and will be removed
from the XS API"
- "lvalue attribute ignored after the subroutine has
been defined"
This new warning is issued when one attempts to mark a
subroutine as lvalue after it has been defined.
- Perl now warns you if "++" or
"--" are unable to change the value
because it's beyond the limit of representation.
This uses a new warnings category:
"imprecision".
- "lc",
"uc",
"lcfirst", and
"ucfirst" warn when passed undef.
- "Show constant in "Useless use of a constant in
void context""
- "Prototype after '%s'"
- "panic: sv_chop %s"
This new fatal error occurs when the C routine
"Perl_sv_chop()" was passed a position
that is not within the scalar's string buffer. This could be caused by
buggy XS code, and at this point recovery is not possible.
- The fatal error "Malformed UTF-8 returned by
\N" is now produced if the
"charnames" handler returns malformed
UTF-8.
- If an unresolved named character or sequence was encountered when
compiling a regex pattern then the fatal error
"\N{NAME} must be resolved
by the lexer" is now produced. This can
happen, for example, when using a single-quotish context like
"$re = '\N{SPACE}'; /$re/;". See
perldiag for more examples of how the lexer can get bypassed.
- "Invalid hexadecimal number in
\N{U+...}" is a new fatal error triggered when the character
constant represented by "..." is not a
valid hexadecimal number.
- The new meaning of "\N" as
"[^\n]" is not valid in a bracketed
character class, just like "." in a
character class loses its special meaning, and will cause the fatal error
"\N in a character class must be a named
character: \N{...}".
- The rules on what is legal for the "..."
in "\N{...}" have been tightened up so
that unless the "..." begins with an
alphabetic character and continues with a combination of alphanumerics,
dashes, spaces, parentheses or colons then the warning
"Deprecated character(s) in
\N{...} starting at '%s'" is now issued.
- The warning "Using just the first characters
returned by \N{}" will be issued if the
"charnames" handler returns a sequence
of characters which exceeds the limit of the number of characters that can
be used. The message will indicate which characters were used and which
were discarded.
A number of existing diagnostic messages have been improved or
corrected:
- •
- A new warning category "illegalproto"
allows finer-grained control of warnings around function prototypes.
The two warnings:
- "Illegal character in prototype for %s : %s"
- "Prototype after '%c' for %s : %s"
have been moved from the
"syntax" top-level warnings category into
a new first-level category,
"illegalproto". These two warnings are
currently the only ones emitted during parsing of an invalid/illegal
prototype, so one can now use
no warnings 'illegalproto';
to suppress only those, but not other syntax-related warnings.
Warnings where prototypes are changed, ignored, or not met are still in the
"prototype" category as before.
- "Deep recursion on subroutine
"%s""
It is now possible to change the depth threshold for this
warning from the default of 100, by recompiling the perl binary,
setting the C pre-processor macro
"PERL_SUB_DEPTH_WARN" to the desired
value.
- "Illegal character in prototype" warning
is now more precise when reporting illegal characters after _
- mro merging error messages are now very similar to those produced by
Algorithm::C3.
- Amelioration of the error message "Unrecognized character
%s in column %d"
Changes the error message to "Unrecognized character
%s; marked by <-- HERE after
%s<-- HERE near column
%d". This should make it a little simpler
to spot and correct the suspicious character.
- Perl now explicitly points to $. when it causes an
uninitialized warning for ranges in scalar context.
- "split" now warns when called in void
context.
- "printf"-style functions called with too
few arguments will now issue the warning "Missing
argument in %s" [perl #71000]
- Perl now properly returns a syntax error instead of segfaulting if
"each",
"keys", or
"values" is used without an
argument.
- "tell()" now fails properly if called
without an argument and when no previous file was read.
"tell()" now returns
"-1", and sets errno to
"EBADF", thus restoring the 5.8.x
behaviour.
- "overload" no longer implicitly unsets
fallback on repeated 'use overload' lines.
- POSIX::strftime() can now handle Unicode characters in the format
string.
- The "syntax" category was removed from 5
warnings that should only be in
"deprecated".
- Three fatal
"pack"/"unpack"
error messages have been normalized to "panic:
%s"
- "Unicode character is illegal" has been
rephrased to be more accurate
It now reads "Unicode non-character is
illegal in interchange" and the perldiag documentation has
been expanded a bit.
- Currently, all but the first of the several characters that the
"charnames" handler may return are
discarded when used in a regular expression pattern bracketed character
class. If this happens then the warning "Using just
the first character returned by \N{} in character
class" will be issued.
- The warning "Missing right brace on \N{} or
unescaped left brace after \N. Assuming the
latter" will be issued if Perl encounters a
"\N{" but doesn't find a matching
"}". In this case Perl doesn't know if
it was mistakenly omitted, or if "match non-newline" followed by
"match a "{"" was desired. It
assumes the latter because that is actually a valid interpretation as
written, unlike the other case. If you meant the former, you need to add
the matching right brace. If you did mean the latter, you can silence this
warning by writing instead "\N\{".
- "gmtime" and
"localtime" called with numbers smaller
than they can reliably handle will now issue the warnings
"gmtime(%.0f) too small" and
"localtime(%.0f) too small".
The following diagnostic messages have been removed:
- U+0FFFF is now a legal character in regular expressions.
- pp_qr now always returns a new regexp SV. Resolves RT #69852.
Instead of returning a(nother) reference to the (pre-compiled)
regexp in the optree, use reg_temp_copy() to create a copy of it,
and return a reference to that. This resolves issues about
Regexp::DESTROY not being called in a timely fashion (the original bug
tracked by RT #69852), as well as bugs related to blessing regexps, and
of assigning to regexps, as described in correspondence added to the
ticket.
It transpires that we also need to undo the SvPVX()
sharing when ithreads cloning a Regexp SV, because mother_re is set to
NULL, instead of a cloned copy of the mother_re. This change might fix
bugs with regexps and threads in certain other situations, but as yet
neither tests nor bug reports have indicated any problems, so it might
not actually be an edge case that it's possible to reach.
- Several compilation errors and segfaults when perl was built with
"-Dmad" were fixed.
- Fixes for lexer API changes in 5.11.2 which broke NYTProf's savesrc
option.
- "-t" should only return TRUE for file
handles connected to a TTY
The Microsoft C version of
"isatty()" returns TRUE for all
character mode devices, including the /dev/null-style
"nul" device and printers like "lpt1".
- Fixed a regression caused by commit fafafbaf which caused a panic during
parameter passing [perl #70171]
- On systems which in-place edits without backup files, -i'*' now works as
the documentation says it does [perl #70802]
- Saving and restoring magic flags no longer loses readonly flag.
- The malformed syntax "grep EXPR LIST"
(note the missing comma) no longer causes abrupt and total failure.
- Regular expressions compiled with "qr{}"
literals properly set "$'" when matching
again.
- Using named subroutines with "sort"
should no longer lead to bus errors [perl #71076]
- Numerous bugfixes catch small issues caused by the recently-added Lexer
API.
- Smart match against @_ sometimes gave false
negatives. [perl #71078]
- $@ may now be assigned a read-only value (without
error or busting the stack).
- "sort" called recursively from within an
active comparison subroutine no longer causes a bus error if run multiple
times. [perl #71076]
- Tie::Hash::NamedCapture::* will not abort if passed bad input (RT
#71828)
- @_ and $_ no longer leak
under threads (RT #34342 and #41138, also #70602, #70974)
- "-I" on shebang line now adds
directories in front of @INC as documented, and as
does "-I" when specified on the
command-line.
- "kill" is now fatal when called on
non-numeric process identifiers. Previously, an
"undef" process identifier would be
interpreted as a request to kill process 0, which would terminate the
current process group on POSIX systems. Since process identifiers are
always integers, killing a non-numeric process is now fatal.
- 5.10.0 inadvertently disabled an optimisation, which caused a measurable
performance drop in list assignment, such as is often used to assign
function parameters from @_. The optimisation has
been re-instated, and the performance regression fixed. (This fix is also
present in 5.10.1)
- Fixed memory leak on "while (1) { map 1, 1
}" [RT #53038].
- Some potential coredumps in PerlIO fixed [RT #57322,54828].
- The debugger now works with lvalue subroutines.
- The debugger's "m" command was broken on
modules that defined constants [RT #61222].
- "crypt" and string complement could
return tainted values for untainted arguments [RT #59998].
- The "-i".suffix command-line
switch now recreates the file using restricted permissions, before
changing its mode to match the original file. This eliminates a potential
race condition [RT #60904].
- On some Unix systems, the value in $? would not
have the top bit set ("$? & 128")
even if the child core dumped.
- Under some circumstances, $^R could incorrectly
become undefined [RT #57042].
- In the XS API, various hash functions, when passed a pre-computed hash
where the key is UTF-8, might result in an incorrect lookup.
- XS code including XSUB.h before perl.h gave a compile-time
error [RT #57176].
- "$object->isa('Foo')" would report
false if the package "Foo" didn't exist,
even if the object's @ISA contained
"Foo".
- Various bugs in the new-to 5.10.0 mro code, triggered by manipulating
@ISA, have been found and fixed.
- Bitwise operations on references could crash the interpreter, e.g.
"$x=\$y; $x |= "foo"" [RT
#54956].
- Patterns including alternation might be sensitive to the internal UTF-8
representation, e.g.
my $byte = chr(192);
my $utf8 = chr(192); utf8::upgrade($utf8);
$utf8 =~ /$byte|X}/i; # failed in 5.10.0
- Within UTF8-encoded Perl source files (i.e. where
"use utf8" is in effect), double-quoted
literal strings could be corrupted where a
"\xNN",
"\0NNN" or
"\N{}" is followed by a literal
character with ordinal value greater than 255 [RT #59908].
- "B::Deparse" failed to correctly deparse
various constructs: "readpipe STRING"
[RT #62428], "CORE::require(STRING)" [RT
#62488], "sub foo(_)" [RT #62484].
- Using "setpgrp" with no arguments could
corrupt the perl stack.
- The block form of "eval" is now
specifically trappable by "Safe" and
"ops". Previously it was erroneously
treated like string "eval".
- In 5.10.0, the two characters "[~" were
sometimes parsed as the smart match operator
("~~") [RT #63854].
- In 5.10.0, the "*" quantifier in
patterns was sometimes treated as
"{0,32767}" [RT #60034, #60464]. For
example, this match would fail:
("ab" x 32768) =~ /^(ab)*$/
- "shmget" was limited to a 32 bit segment
size on a 64 bit OS [RT #63924].
- Using "next" or
"last" to exit a
"given" block no longer produces a
spurious warning like the following:
Exiting given via last at foo.pl line 123
- Assigning a format to a glob could corrupt the format; e.g.:
*bar=*foo{FORMAT}; # foo format now bad
- Attempting to coerce a typeglob to a string or number could cause an
assertion failure. The correct error message is now generated,
"Can't coerce GLOB to
$type".
- Under "use filetest 'access'",
"-x" was using the wrong access mode.
This has been fixed [RT #49003].
- "length" on a tied scalar that returned
a Unicode value would not be correct the first time. This has been
fixed.
- Using an array "tie" inside in array
"tie" could SEGV. This has been fixed.
[RT #51636]
- A race condition inside
"PerlIOStdio_close()" has been
identified and fixed. This used to cause various threading issues,
including SEGVs.
- In "unpack", the use of
"()" groups in scalar context was
internally placing a list on the interpreter's stack, which manifested in
various ways, including SEGVs. This is now fixed [RT #50256].
- Magic was called twice in "substr",
"\&$x", "tie
$x, $m" and "chop". These
have all been fixed.
- A 5.10.0 optimisation to clear the temporary stack within the implicit
loop of "s///ge" has been reverted, as
it turned out to be the cause of obscure bugs in seemingly unrelated parts
of the interpreter [commit ef0d4e17921ee3de].
- The line numbers for warnings inside
"elsif" are now correct.
- The ".." operator now works correctly
with ranges whose ends are at or close to the values of the smallest and
largest integers.
- "binmode STDIN, ':raw'" could lead to
segmentation faults on some platforms. This has been fixed [RT
#54828].
- An off-by-one error meant that "index $str,
..." was effectively being executed as
"index "$str\0", ...". This
has been fixed [RT #53746].
- Various leaks associated with named captures in regexes have been fixed
[RT #57024].
- A weak reference to a hash would leak. This was affecting
"DBI" [RT #56908].
- Using (?|) in a regex could cause a segfault [RT #59734].
- Use of a UTF-8 "tr//" within a closure
could cause a segfault [RT #61520].
- Calling "Perl_sv_chop()" or otherwise
upgrading an SV could result in an unaligned 64-bit access on the SPARC
architecture [RT #60574].
- In the 5.10.0 release,
"inc_version_list" would incorrectly
list "5.10.*" after
"5.8.*"; this affected the
@INC search order [RT #67628].
- In 5.10.0, "pack "a*",
$tainted_value" returned a non-tainted value [RT #52552].
- In 5.10.0, "printf" and
"sprintf" could produce the fatal error
"panic: utf8_mg_pos_cache_update" when
printing UTF-8 strings [RT #62666].
- In the 5.10.0 release, a dynamically created
"AUTOLOAD" method might be missed
(method cache issue) [RT #60220,60232].
- In the 5.10.0 release, a combination of "use
feature" and "//ee" could
cause a memory leak [RT #63110].
- "-C" on the shebang
("#!") line is once more permitted if it
is also specified on the command line.
"-C" on the shebang line used to be a
silent no-op if it was not also on the command line, so perl 5.10.0
disallowed it, which broke some scripts. Now perl checks whether it is
also on the command line and only dies if it is not [RT #67880].
- In 5.10.0, certain types of re-entrant regular expression could crash, or
cause the following assertion failure [RT #60508]:
Assertion rx->sublen >= (s - rx->subbeg) + i failed
- Perl now includes previously missing files from the Unicode Character
Database.
- Perl now honors "TMPDIR" when opening an
anonymous temporary file.
Perl is incredibly portable. In general, if a platform has a C
compiler, someone has ported Perl to it (or will soon). We're happy to
announce that Perl 5.12 includes support for several new platforms. At the
same time, it's time to bid farewell to some (very) old friends.
- Haiku
- Perl's developers have merged patches from Haiku's maintainers. Perl
should now build on Haiku.
- MirOS BSD
- Perl should now build on MirOS BSD.
- AIX
- Removed libbsd for AIX 5L and 6.1. Only
"flock()" was used from
libbsd.
- Removed libgdbm for AIX 5L and 6.1 if libgdbm < 1.8.3-5
is installed. The libgdbm is delivered as an optional package with
the AIX Toolbox. Unfortunately the versions below 1.8.3-5 are broken.
- Hints changes mean that AIX 4.2 should work again.
- Cygwin
- Perl now supports IPv6 on Cygwin 1.7 and newer.
- On Cygwin we now strip the last number from the DLL. This has been the
behaviour in the cygwin.com build for years. The hints files have been
updated.
- Darwin (Mac OS X)
- Skip testing the be_BY.CP1131 locale on Darwin 10 (Mac OS X 10.6), as it's
still buggy.
- Correct infelicities in the regexp used to identify buggy locales on
Darwin 8 and 9 (Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, respectively).
- DragonFly
BSD
- •
- Fix thread library selection [perl #69686]
- FreeBSD
- •
- The hints files now identify the correct threading libraries on FreeBSD 7
and later.
- Irix
- •
- We now work around a bizarre preprocessor bug in the Irix 6.5 compiler:
"cc -E -" unfortunately goes into
K&R mode, but "cc -E file.c"
doesn't.
- NetBSD
- •
- Hints now supports versions 5.*.
- OpenVMS
- Stratus VOS
- •
- Various changes from Stratus have been merged in.
- Symbian
- •
- There is now support for Symbian S60 3.2 SDK and S60 5.0 SDK.
- Windows
- Perl 5.12 supports Windows 2000 and later. The supporting code for legacy
versions of Windows is still included, but will be removed during the next
development cycle.
- Initial support for building Perl with MinGW-w64 is now available.
- perl.exe now includes a manifest resource to specify the
"trustInfo" settings for Windows Vista
and later. Without this setting Windows would treat perl.exe as a
legacy application and apply various heuristics like redirecting access to
protected file system areas (like the "Program Files" folder) to
the users "VirtualStore" instead of generating a proper
"permission denied" error.
The manifest resource also requests the Microsoft
Common-Controls version 6.0 (themed controls introduced in Windows XP).
Check out the Win32::VisualStyles module on CPAN to switch back to old
style unthemed controls for legacy applications.
- The "-t" filetest operator now only
returns true if the filehandle is connected to a console window. In
previous versions of Perl it would return true for all character mode
devices, including NUL and LPT1.
- The "-p" filetest operator now works
correctly, and the Fcntl::S_IFIFO constant is defined when Perl is
compiled with Microsoft Visual C. In previous Perl versions
"-p" always returned a false value, and
the Fcntl::S_IFIFO constant was not defined.
This bug is specific to Microsoft Visual C and never affected
Perl binaries built with MinGW.
- The socket error codes are now more widely supported: The POSIX module
will define the symbolic names, like POSIX::EWOULDBLOCK, and
stringification of socket error codes in $! works as well now;
C:\>perl -MPOSIX -E "$!=POSIX::EWOULDBLOCK; say $!"
A non-blocking socket operation could not be completed immediately.
- flock() will now set sensible error codes in $!. Previous Perl
versions copied the value of $^E into $!, which caused much
confusion.
- select() now supports all empty
"fd_set"s more correctly.
- '.\foo' and '..\foo' were
treated differently than './foo' and
'../foo' by "do"
and "require" [RT #63492].
- Improved message window handling means that
"alarm" and
"kill" messages will no longer be
dropped under race conditions.
- Various bits of Perl's build infrastructure are no longer converted to
win32 line endings at release time. If this hurts you, please report the
problem with the perlbug program included with perl.
This is a list of some significant unfixed bugs, which are
regressions from either 5.10.x or 5.8.x.
- •
- This one is actually a change introduced in 5.10.0, but it was missed from
that release's perldelta, so it is mentioned here instead.
A bugfix related to the handling of the
"/m" modifier and
"qr" resulted in a change of behaviour
between 5.8.x and 5.10.0:
# matches in 5.8.x, doesn't match in 5.10.0
$re = qr/^bar/; "foo\nbar" =~ /$re/m;
Perl 5.12.0 represents approximately two years of development
since Perl 5.10.0 and contains over 750,000 lines of changes across over
3,000 files from over 200 authors and committers.
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 5.12.0:
Aaron Crane, Abe Timmerman, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, Adam
Russell, Adriano Ferreira, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason,
Alan Grover, Alexandr Ciornii, Alex Davies, Alex Vandiver, Andreas Koenig,
Andrew Rodland, andrew@sundale.net, Andy Armstrong, Andy Dougherty, Jose
AUGUSTE-ETIENNE, Benjamin Smith, Ben Morrow, bharanee rathna, Bo Borgerson,
Bo Lindbergh, Brad Gilbert, Bram, Brendan O'Dea, brian d foy, Charles
Bailey, Chip Salzenberg, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Christoph Lamprecht, Chris
Williams, chromatic, Claes Jakobsson, Craig A. Berry, Dan Dascalescu, Daniel
Frederick Crisman, Daniel M. Quinlan, Dan Jacobson, Dan Kogai, Dave
Mitchell, Dave Rolsky, David Cantrell, David Dick, David Golden, David
Mitchell, David M. Syzdek, David Nicol, David Wheeler, Dennis Kaarsemaker,
Dintelmann, Peter, Dominic Dunlop, Dr.Ruud, Duke Leto, Enrico Sorcinelli,
Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Frank Wiegand, Gabor
Szabo, Gene Sullivan, Geoffrey T. Dairiki, George Greer, Gerard Goossen,
Gisle Aas, Goro Fuji, Graham Barr, Green, Paul, Hans Dieter Pearcey, Harmen,
H. Merijn Brand, Hugo van der Sanden, Ian Goodacre, Igor Sutton, Ingo
Weinhold, James Bence, James Mastros, Jan Dubois, Jari Aalto, Jarkko
Hietaniemi, Jay Hannah, Jerry Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, Jody Belka,
John E. Malmberg, John Malmberg, John Peacock, John Peacock via RT, John P.
Linderman, John Wright, Josh ben Jore, Jos I. Boumans, Karl Williamson,
Kenichi Ishigaki, Ken Williams, Kevin Brintnall, Kevin Ryde, Kurt Starsinic,
Leon Brocard, Lubomir Rintel, Luke Ross, Marcel Grünauer, Marcus
Holland-Moritz, Mark Jason Dominus, Marko Asplund, Martin Hasch, Mashrab
Kuvatov, Matt Kraai, Matt S Trout, Max Maischein, Michael Breen, Michael
Cartmell, Michael G Schwern, Michael Witten, Mike Giroux, Milosz Tanski,
Moritz Lenz, Nicholas Clark, Nick Cleaton, Niko Tyni, Offer Kaye, Osvaldo
Villalon, Paul Fenwick, Paul Gaborit, Paul Green, Paul Johnson, Paul
Marquess, Philip Hazel, Philippe Bruhat, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Rainer
Tammer, Rajesh Mandalemula, Reini Urban, Renée Bäcker, Ricardo
Signes, Ricardo SIGNES, Richard Foley, Rich Rauenzahn, Rick Delaney, Risto
Kankkunen, Robert May, Roberto C. Sanchez, Robin Barker, SADAHIRO Tomoyuki,
Salvador Ortiz Garcia, Sam Vilain, Scott Lanning, Sébastien
Aperghis-Tramoni, Sérgio Durigan Júnior, Shlomi Fish, Simon
'corecode' Schubert, Sisyphus, Slaven Rezic, Smylers, Steffen Müller,
Steffen Ullrich, Stepan Kasal, Steve Hay, Steven Schubiger, Steve Peters,
Tels, The Doctor, Tim Bunce, Tim Jenness, Todd Rinaldo, Tom Christiansen,
Tom Hukins, Tom Wyant, Tony Cook, Torsten Schoenfeld, Tye McQueen, Vadim
Konovalov, Vincent Pit, Hio YAMASHINA, Yasuhiro Matsumoto, Yitzchak
Scott-Thoennes, Yuval Kogman, Yves Orton, Zefram, Zsban Ambrus
This is woefully incomplete as it's automatically generated from
version control history. In particular, it doesn't include the names of the
(very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues in previous
versions of Perl that helped make Perl 5.12.0 better. For a more complete
list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the
"AUTHORS" file in the Perl 5.12.0
distribution.
Our "retired" pumpkings Nicholas Clark and Rafael
Garcia-Suarez deserve special thanks for their brilliant and substantive
ongoing contributions. Nicholas personally authored over 30% of the patches
since 5.10.0. Rafael comes in second in patch authorship with 11%, but is
first by a long shot in committing patches authored by others, pushing 44%
of the commits since 5.10.0 in this category, often after providing
considerable coaching to the patch authors. These statistics in no way
comprise all of their contributions, but express in shorthand that we
couldn't have done it without them.
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.
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 analyzed 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.
<http://dev.perl.org/perl5/errata.html> for a list of issues
found after this release, as well as a list of CPAN modules known to be
incompatible with this release.