perl5115delta - what is new for perl v5.11.5
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Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL5115DELTA(1)
NAME
perl5115delta - what is new for perl v5.11.5
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.11.4 release and the
5.11.5 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.11.3, first read
perl5114delta, which describes differences between 5.11.3 and 5.11.4.
Core Enhancements
32-bit limit on substr arguments removed
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.
Modules and Pragmata
Pragmata Changes
"version"
Upgraded from version 0.81 to 0.82.
The "is_lax" and "is_strict" functions can now be optionally
exported to the caller's namespace and are also now documented.
Undefined version objects are now uninitialized with zero rather
than "undef".
Updated Modules
"B::Debug"
Upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.12.
"CPAN"
Upgraded from version 1.94_53 to 1.94_56.
This resolves RT #72362, in which CPAN was ignoring
"configure_requires", and RT #72348, in which the command "o conf
init" in the CPAN shell could cause an exception to be thrown.
This module is also now built in a less specialized way, which
resolves a problem that caused "make" after "make clean" to fail,
fixing RT #72218.
"CPANPLUS::Dist::Build"
Upgraded from version 0.44 to 0.46.
This makes the prereq resolving fall back to _build/ querying if
the "prereq_data" action fails.
"Pod::Perldoc"
Upgraded from version 3.15_01 to 3.15_02.
"Pod::Plainer"
Upgraded from version 1.01 to 1.02.
"Safe"
Upgraded from version 2.21 to 2.22.
This resolves RT #72700, in which an exception thrown from a
closure was getting lost.
"Socket"
Upgraded from version 1.85 to 1.86.
This makes the new Socket implementation of "inet_pton" consistent
with the existing Socket6 implementation of "inet_pton", fixing RT
#72884.
"podlators"
Upgraded from version 2.2.2 to 2.3.1.
Changes to Existing Documentation
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.
Installation and Configuration Improvements
Configuration improvements
Support for SystemTap's "dtrace" compatibility layer has been added and
an issue with linking "miniperl" has been fixed in the process.
"less -R" is now used instead of "less" for "groff"'s new usage of ANSI
escape codes by setting $Config{less} (and thereby $Config{pager},
which fixes RT #72156.
USE_PERL_ATOF is now reported in the compile-time options listed by the
"-V" switch.
Selected Bug Fixes
o Arbitrary whitespace is now allowed between "NAME" and "VERSION" in
"package NAME VERSION;" statements. (Fixes RT #72432)
o A panic caused by trying to load "charnames" when the parser is
already in error (e.g. by a missing "my" under "use strict;") is
now averted. This was a regression since Perl 5.10.0. (Fixes RT
#72590)
o Reading $! no longer causes a SEGV for out of range "errno" values.
(Fixes RT #72850)
o A possible SEGV in "/\N{...}/" has been fixed. This was a
regression since Perl 5.10.
o A possible SEGV when freeing a scalar that was upgraded to an
"SVt_REGEXP" type from a simple(r) scalar has been fixed.
o A type conversion bug in "gmtime64" that caused it to break around
"2**48" has been fixed.
o Interpolating a regex that makes use of the "charnames" pragma will
no longer cause a run-time error. (Fixes RT #56444)
o Array references assigned to *Foo::ISA now have the necessary magic
added to them to catch any further updates to the new @ISA. (Fixes
RT #72866)
o Filehandles are now always blessed into "IO::File", which, together
with some suitable manipulation of @IO::File::ISA, fixes a breakage
introduced in Perl 5.11.3 by a change that always blessed
filehandles into "IO::Handle" rather than checking for "FileHandle"
first.
o A change in the behaviour of "warnings::enabled" and
"warnings::warnif" in Perl 5.10.0 that wasn't documented at the
time is now documented in perl5100delta. (Fixes RT #62522)
o RT #71504 is now fixed by simply skipping the tests that failed on
OpenBSD with ithreads and perlio.
New or Changed Diagnostics
o The fatal error "Malformed UTF-8 returned by \N" is now produced if
the "charnames" handler returns malformed UTF-8.
o If an unresolved named character or sequence was encountered when
compiling a regex pattern then the fatal error "\\N{NAME} must be
resolved by the lexer" is now produced. This can happen, for
example, when using a single-quotish context like "$re =
'\N{SPACE}'; $re;". See perldiag for more examples of how the lexer
can get bypassed.
o The fatal error "Invalid hexadecimal number in \\N{U+...}" will be
produced if the character constant represented by "..." is not a
valid hexadecimal number.
o 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{...}".
o 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.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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\{".
o "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".
New Tests
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 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.
Known Problems
Perl 5.11.5 is a development release leading up to Perl 5.12.0. Some
notable known problems found in 5.11.5 are listed as dependencies of RT
#69710, the Perl 5 version 12 meta-ticket.
Acknowledgements
Perl 5.11.5 represents approximately one month of development since
Perl 5.11.4 and contains 9618 lines of changes across 151 files from 33
authors and committers:
var Arnfjoer` Bjarmason, Abigail, brian d foy, Chris Williams, David
Golden, David Mitchell, Eric Brine, Frank Wiegand, Gisle Aas, H.Merijn
Brand, Jan Dubois, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, John Peacock, Josh ben
Jore, Karl Williamson, Marcus Holland-Moritz, Michael G Schwern,
Nicholas Clark, Offer Kaye, Philippe Bruhat (BooK), Rafael Garcia-
Suarez, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Robin Barker, Slaven Rezic,
Steffen Mueller, Steve Hay, Steve Peters, Tim Bunce, Todd Rinaldo, Tony
Cook and Vincent Pit.
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.
Reporting Bugs
If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
database at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ . There may also be
information at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.
If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a
tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output
of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be 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 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.
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
+---------------+------------------+
|ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+---------------+------------------+
|Availability | runtime/perl-512 |
+---------------+------------------+
|Stability | Uncommitted |
+---------------+------------------+
SEE ALSO
The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details
on what changed.
The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
The README file for general stuff.
The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
NOTES
This software was built from source available at
https://java.net/projects/solaris-userland. The original community
source was downloaded from
http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.12.5.tar.bz2
Further information about this software can be found on the open source
community website at http://www.perl.org/.
perl v5.12.5 2012-11-03 PERL5115DELTA(1)