perl51311delta - what is new for perl v5.13.11
This document describes differences between the 5.13.10 release and the 5.13.11 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.13.9, first read perl5139delta, which describes differences between 5.13.9 and 5.13.10.
Perl no longer allows a tainted regular expression to invoke a user-defined
property via \p{...}
syntax. It simply dies instead [perl #82616].
local() on scalar variables will give them a new value, but keep all their magic intact. This has proven to be problematic for the default scalar variable $_, where perlsub recommends that any subroutine that assigns to $_ should localize it first. This would throw an exception if $_ is aliased to a read-only variable, and could have various unintentional side-effects in general.
Therefore, as an exception to the general rule, local($_) will not only assign a new value to $_, but also remove all existing magic from it as well.
An earlier Perl 5.13.x release changed warn($ref) to leave the reference
unchanged, allowing $SIG{__WARN__}
handlers to access the original
reference. But this stopped warnings that were references from having the
file and line number appended even when there was no $SIG{__WARN__}
handler in place.
Now warn checks for the presence of such a handler and, if there is
none, proceeds to stringify the reference and append the file and line
number. This allows simple uses of warn for debugging to continue to
work as they did before.
On Windows parent processes would not terminate until all forked
childred had terminated first. However, kill('KILL', ...)
is
inherently unstable on pseudo-processes, and kill('TERM', ...)
might not get delivered if the child if blocked in a system call.
To avoid the deadlock and still provide a safe mechanism to terminate the hosting process, Perl will now no longer wait for children that have been sent a SIGTERM signal. It is up to the parent process to waitpid() for these children if child clean-up processing must be allowed to finish. However, it is also the responsibility of the parent then to avoid the deadlock by making sure the child process can't be blocked on I/O either.
See perlfork for more information about the fork() emulation on Windows.
Perl scripts used to be read in binary mode on Windows for the benefit of the ByteLoader module (which is no longer part of core Perl). This had the side effect of breaking various operations on the DATA filehandle, including seek()/tell(), and even simply reading from DATA after file handles have been flushed by a call to system(), backticks, fork() etc.
The default build options for Windows have been changed to read Perl source code on Windows in text mode now. Hopefully ByteLoader will be updated on CPAN to automatically handle this situation.
An earlier optimisation to speed up my @array = ...
and
my %hash = ...
assignments caused a bug and was disabled in Perl 5.12.0.
Now we have found another way to speed up these assignments [perl #82110].
attributes
has been upgraded from version 0.13 to 0.14.
base
has been upgraded from version 2.15 to 2.16.
CPAN
has been upgraded from version 1.94_65 to 1.9600.
CPANPLUS
has been upgraded from version 0.9101 to 0.9103
CPANPLUS::Dist::Build
has been upgraded from version 0.52 to 0.54
Cwd
has been downgraded from version 3.37 to 3.36.
An optimisation that recent core changes have rendered unnecessary has been reverted.
Devel::DProf
has been upgraded from version 20110225.01 to 20110228.00.
Digest::SHA
has been upgraded from version 5.50 to 5.61
New SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256 transforms ref. NIST Draft FIPS 180-4 (February 2011)
ExtUtils::Command
has been upgraded from version 1.16 to 1.17.
File::Copy
has been downgraded from version 2.22 to 2.21.
An optimisation that recent core changes have rendered unnecessary has been reverted.
File::Glob
has been upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.12.
GDBM_File
has been upgraded from version 1.13 to 1.14.
Hash::Util
has been upgraded from version 0.10 to 0.11.
Hash::Util::FieldHash
has been upgraded from version 1.08 to 1.09.
HTTP::Tiny
has been upgraded from version 0.010 to 0.011.
I18N::Langinfo
has been upgraded from version 0.07 to 0.08.
IO
has been upgraded from version 1.25_03 to 1.25_04.
JSON::PP
has been upgraded from version 2.27103 to 2.27105
Locale::Codes
has been upgraded from version 3.15 to 3.16
Math::BigInt
has been upgraded from version 1.992 to 1.994
Math::BigInt::FastCalc
has been upgraded from version 0.24_02 to 0.28
Module::Build
has been upgraded from version 0.37_05 to 0.3800
Module::CoreList
has been upgraded from version 2.45 to 2.46.
mro
has been upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.07.
NDBM_File
has been upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.12.
parent
has been upgraded from version 0.224 to 0.225
Pod::Simple
has been upgraded from version 3.15 to 3.16
Storable
has been upgraded from version 2.26 to 2.27.
Sys::Hostname
has been upgraded from version 1.15 to 1.16.
Test::Harness
has been upgraded from version 3.22 to 3.23
Test::Simple
has been upgraded from version 0.97_01 to 0.98
Tie::Hash::NamedCapture
has been upgraded from version 0.07 to 0.08.
Some of the Perl code has been converted to XS for efficency's sake.
Tie::RefHash
has been upgraded from version 1.38 to 1.39.
Unicode::Collate
has been upgraded from version 0.72 to 0.73
DUCET has been updated for Unicode 6.0.0 as Collate/allkeys.txt and the default UCA_Version is 22.
Unicode::UCD
has been upgraded from version 0.31 to 0.32.
This includes a number of bug fixes:
It is now updated to Unicode Version 6 with Corrigendum #8, except, as with Perl 5.14, the code point at U+1F514 has no name.
The Hangul syllable code points have the correct names, and their decompositions are always output without requiring Lingua::KO::Hangul::Util to be installed.
The CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) code points U+2A700 - U+2B734 and U+2B740 - 2B81D are now properly handled.
The numeric values are now output for those CJK code points that have them.
The names that are output for code points with multiple aliases are now the corrected ones.
This now correctly returns "Unknown" instead of undef for the script
of a code point that hasn't been assigned another one.
This now correctly returns "No_Block" instead of undef for the block
of a code point that hasn't been assigned to another one.
XS::Typemap
has been upgraded from version 0.04 to 0.05.
Clarified the order in which to check $@
and $!
after do FILE
.
(RT #80626)
The following additions or changes have been made to diagnostic output, including warnings and fatal error messages. For the complete list of diagnostic messages, see perldiag.
Regexp modifier "/%c" may not appear twice
(F syntax) The regular expression pattern had one of the mutually exclusive modifiers repeated. Remove all but one of the occurrences.
Regexp modifiers "/%c" and "/%c" are mutually exclusive
(F syntax) The regular expression pattern had more than one of the mutually exclusive modifiers. Retain only the modifier that is supposed to be there.
Insecure user-defined property %s
(F) Perl detected tainted data when trying to compile a regular
expression that contains a call to a user-defined character property
function, i.e. \p{IsFoo}
or \p{InFoo}
.
See User-Defined Character Properties in perlunicode and perlsec.
Many of the tests have been refactored to use testing libraries more consistently. In some cases test files were created or deleted:
The tests for split /\s/
and Unicode have been moved from
t/op/split.t to the new t/op/split_unicode.t.
t/re/re.t has been moved to ext/re/t/re_funcs_u.t.
The tests for [perl #72922] have been moved from t/re/qr.t to the new t/re/qr-72922.t.
t/re/reg_unsafe.t has been deleted and its only test moved to t/re/pat_advanced.t.
A fix for a bug in length(undef) in 5.13.4 introduced a regression that
meant print length undef
did not warn when warnings were enabled. It now
correctly warns [perl #85508].
The (?|...) regular expression construct no longer crashes if the final
branch has more sets of capturing parentheses than any other branch. This
was fixed in Perl 5.10.1 for the case of a single branch, but that fix did
not take multiple branches into account [perl #84746].
Accessing an element of a package array with a hard-coded number (as opposed to an arbitrary expression) would crash if the array did not exist. Usually the array would be autovivified during compilation, but typeglob manipulation could remove it, as in these two cases which used to crash:
#line
directives in string evals were not properly updating the arrays
of lines of code (@{"_<..."}
) that the debugger (or any debugging or
profiling module) uses. In threaded builds, they were not being updated at
all. In non-threaded builds, the line number was ignored, so any change to
the existing line number would cause the lines to be misnumbered
[perl #79442].
$AUTOLOAD
used to remain tainted forever if it ever became tainted. Now
it is correctly untainted if an autoloaded method is called and the method
name was not tainted.
A bug has been fixed in the implementation of {...}
quantifiers in
regular expressions that prevented the code block in
/((\w+)(?{ print $2 })){2}/
from seeing the $2
sometimes
[perl #84294].
sprintf now dies when passed a tainted scalar for the format. It did
already die for arbitrary expressions, but not for simple scalars
[perl #82250].
DESTROY methods of objects implementing ties are no longer able to crash by accessing the tied variable through a weak reference [perl #86328].
On Windows, calling kill(9, $child) on a pseudo-process created by the fork() emulation is inherently unstable. It can also be responsible for overriding the parent process exit code with a value of '9' if the parent terminates right after killing the child. This condition will now happen a lot less often than before.
See also fork() emulation will not wait for signalled children for a better way to terminate child processes that avoids deadlocks altogether.
Ensure that the exists &Errno::EFOO
idiom continues to work as documented.
A change post-5.12 caused the documented idiom not to work if Errno was loaded
after the exists code had been compiled, as the compiler implicitly creates
typeglobs in the Errno symbol table when it builds the optree for the exists
code
.
Perl 5.13.11 represents approximately one month of development since Perl 5.13.10 and contains approximately 80,000 lines of changes across 549 files from 31 authors and committers:
Alastair Douglas, Arvan, Boris Ratner, brian d foy, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, David Golden, David Leadbeater, David Mitchell, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Jan Dubois, Karl Williamson, Kevin Ryde, Leon Brocard, Leon Timmermans, Michael Stevens, Michael Witten, Moritz Lenz, Nicholas Clark, Paul Johnson, Peter John Acklam, Reini Urban, Robin Barker, Steve Hay, Sullivan Beck, Tony Cook, Vadim Konovalov, Yves Orton, Zefram and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
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
analysed by the Perl porting team.
If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core committers, who 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.