PERL5121DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL5121DELTA(1)
NAME
perl5121delta - what is new for perl v5.12.1
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.12.0 release and the 5.12.1 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.10.1, first read perl5120delta, which describes
differences between 5.10.1 and 5.12.0.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.0. If any incompatibilities with 5.12.0 exist, they
are bugs. Please report them.
Core Enhancements
Other than the bug fixes listed below, there should be no user-visible changes to the core language in this
release.
Modules and Pragmata
Pragmata Changes
· We fixed exporting of "is_strict" and "is_lax" from version.
These were being exported with a wrapper that treated them as method calls, which caused them to fail.
They are just functions, are documented as such, and should never be subclassed, so this patch just
exports them directly as functions without the wrapper.
Updated Modules
· We upgraded CGI.pm to version 3.49 to incorporate fixes for regressions introduced in the release we
shipped with Perl 5.12.0.
· We upgraded Pod::Simple to version 3.14 to get an improvement to \C\<\< \>\> parsing.
· We made a small fix to the CPANPLUS test suite to fix an occasional spurious test failure.
· We upgraded Safe to version 2.27 to wrap coderefs returned by "reval()" and "rdo()".
Changes to Existing Documentation
· We added the new maintenance release policy to perlpolicy.pod
· We've clarified the multiple-angle-bracket construct in the spec for POD in perlpodspec
· We added a missing explanation for a warning about ":=" to perldiag.pod
· We removed a false claim in perlunitut that all text strings are Unicode strings in Perl.
· We updated the Github mirror link in perlrepository to mirrors/perl, not github/perl
· We fixed a a minor error in perl5114delta.pod.
· We replaced a mention of the now-obsolete Switch.pm with given/when.
· We improved documentation about $sitelibexp/sitecustomize.pl in perlrun.
· We corrected perlmodlib.pod which had unintentionally omitted a number of modules.
· We updated the documentation for 'require' in perlfunc.pod relating to putting Perl code in @INC.
· We improved documentation of case-changing functions in perlfunc.pod
· We corrected perlgpl.pod to contain the correct version of the GNU General Public License.
Testing
Testing Improvements
· t/op/sselect.t is now less prone to clock jitter during timing checks on Windows.
sleep() time on Win32 may be rounded down to multiple of the clock tick interval.
· lib/blib.t and lib/locale.t: Fixes for test failures on Darwin/PPC
· perl5db.t: Fix for test failures when "Term::ReadLine::Gnu" is installed.
Installation and Configuration Improvements
Configuration improvements
· We updated INSTALL with notes about how to deal with broken dbm.h on OpenSUSE (and possibly other
platforms)
Bug Fixes
· A bug in how we process filetest operations could cause a segfault. Filetests don't always expect an op
on the stack, so we now use TOPs only if we're sure that we're not stat'ing the _ filehandle. This is
indicated by OPf_KIDS (as checked in ck_ftst).
See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74542>
· When deparsing a nextstate op that has both a change of package (relative to the previous nextstate) and a
label, the package declaration is now emitted first, because it is syntactically impermissible for a label
to prefix a package declaration.
· XSUB.h now correctly redefines fgets under PERL_IMPLICIT_SYS
See also: <http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=55049>
· utf8::is_utf8 now respects GMAGIC (e.g. $1)
· XS code using "fputc()" or "fputs()": on Windows could cause an error due to their arguments being
swapped.
See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=72704>
· We fixed a small bug in lex_stuff_pvn() that caused spurious syntax errors in an obscure situation. It
happened when stuffing was performed on the last line of a file and the line ended with a statement that
lacked a terminating semicolon.
See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74006>
· We fixed a bug that could cause \N{} constructs followed by a single . to be parsed incorrectly.
See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74978>
· We fixed a bug that caused when(scalar) without an argument not to be treated as a syntax error.
Platform Specific Notes
HP-UX
· Perl now allows -Duse64bitint without promoting to use64bitall on HP-UX
AIX
· Perl now builds on AIX 4.2
The changes required work around AIX 4.2s' lack of support for IPv6, and limited support for POSIX
"sigaction()".
FreeBSD 7
· FreeBSD 7 no longer contains /usr/bin/objformat. At build time, Perl now skips the objformat check for
versions 7 and higher and assumes ELF.
VMS
· It's now possible to build extensions on older (pre 7.3-2) VMS systems.
DCL symbol length was limited to 1K up until about seven years or so ago, but there was no particularly
deep reason to prevent those older systems from configuring and building Perl.
· We fixed the previously-broken "-Uuseperlio" build on VMS.
We were checking a variable that doesn't exist in the non-default case of disabling perlio. Now we only
look at it when it exists.
· We fixed the -Uuseperlio command-line option in configure.com.
Formerly it only worked if you went through all the questions interactively and explicitly answered no.
Known Problems
· "List::Util::first" misbehaves in the presence of a lexical $_ (typically introduced by "my $_" or
implicitly by "given"). The variable which gets set for each iteration is the package variable $_, not the
lexical $_.
A similar issue may occur in other modules that provide functions which take a block as their first
argument, like
foo { ... $_ ...} list
See also: <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=67694>
· "Module::Load::Conditional" and "version" have an unfortunate interaction which can cause "CPANPLUS" to
crash when it encounters an unparseable version string. Upgrading to "CPANPLUS" 0.9004 or
"Module::Load::Conditional" 0.38 from CPAN will resolve this issue.
Acknowledgements
Perl 5.12.1 represents approximately four weeks of development since Perl 5.12.0 and contains approximately
4,000 lines of changes across 142 files from 28 authors.
Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The
following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.12.1:
var Arnfjoer` Bjarmason, Chris Williams, chromatic, Craig A. Berry, David Golden, Father Chrysostomos, Florian
Ragwitz, Frank Wiegand, Gene Sullivan, Goro Fuji, H.Merijn Brand, James E Keenan, Jan Dubois, Jesse Vincent,
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 [email protected]. 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.
SEE ALSO
The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on what changed.
The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
The README file for general stuff.
The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
perl v5.16.3 2013-03-04 PERL5121DELTA(1)
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