NAME¶
perl5111delta - what is new for perl v5.11.1
DESCRIPTION¶
This document describes differences between the 5.11.0 release and the 5.11.1
release.
Incompatible Changes¶
- •
- The boolkeys op moved to the group of hash ops. This breaks
binary compatibility.
- •
- "\s" "\w" and "\d" once again
have the semantics they had in Perl 5.8.x.
Core Enhancements¶
Add "package NAME VERSION" syntax¶
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"
- •
- $VERSION is set at compile time
- •
- Eliminates "$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 =
..."
- •
- Alpha versions with underscores do not need to be quoted;
static parsing will preserve the underscore, but during compilation, Perl
will remove underscores as it does for all numeric literals
It does not break old code with only "package NAME", but code that
uses "package NAME VERSION" will need to be restricted to perl
5.11.X 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 N years from now it will become standard practice when Perl 5.12
is targeted the way that 5.6 is today.
Modules and Pragmata¶
Updated Modules¶
- •
- Upgrade to Test-Simple 0.94
- •
- Upgrade to Storable 2.21
- •
- Upgrade to Pod-Simple 3.08
- •
- Upgrade to Parse-CPAN-Meta 1.40
- •
- Upgrade to ExtUtils-Manifest 1.57
- •
- Upgrade to ExtUtils-CBuilder 0.260301
- •
- Upgrade to CGI.pm-3.48
- •
- Upgrade CPANPLUS to CPAN version 0.89_02
- •
- Upgrade to threads::shared 1.32
- •
- Upgrade ExtUtils::ParseXS to 2.21
- •
- Upgrade File::Path to 2.08 (and add taint.t test)
- •
- Upgrade Module::CoreList to 2.20
- •
- Updated Object::Accessor to0.36
New Documentation¶
- •
- perlpolicy extends the "Social contract about
contributed modules" into the beginnings of a document on Perl
porting policies.
Changes to Existing Documentation¶
- Documentation for $1 in perlvar.pod clarified
- "if (%foo)" has been optimized to be faster than
"if (keys %foo)"
- 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]
- Win32
- •
- Initial support for mingw64 is now available
- •
- Various bits of Perl's build infrastructure are no longer
converted to win32 line endings at release time. If this hurts you, please
speak up.
Selected Bug Fixes¶
- •
- 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 Windows select() implementation now supports all
empty "fd_set"s more correctly.
New or Changed Diagnostics¶
- •
- 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.
- •
- Perl now defaults to issuing a warning if a deprecated
language feature is used.
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
Testing¶
- •
- 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.
Known Problems¶
- Untriaged test crashes on Windows 2000
- Several porters have reported mysterious crashes when
Perl's entire test suite is run after a build on certain Windows 2000
systems. When run by hand, the individual tests reportedly work fine.
- Known test failures on VMS
- Perl 5.11.1 fails a small set of core and CPAN tests as of
this release. With luck, that'll be sorted out for 5.11.2
Errata for 5.11.0¶
- The Perl 5.11.0 release notes incorrectly described 'delete
local'
Acknowledgements¶
Perl 5.11.1 represents approximately 3 weeks development since Perl 5.11.0
contains 22,000 lines of changes across 396 files from 26 authors and
committers:
Abigail, Alex Vandiver, brian d foy, Chris Williams, Craig A. Berry, David
Fifield, David Golden, demerphq, Eric Brine, Geoffrey T. Dairiki, George
Greer, H.Merijn Brand, Jan Dubois, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Josh ben
Jore, Max Maischein, Nicholas Clark, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Simon Schubert,
Sisyphus, Smylers, Steve Hay, Steve Peters, Vincent Pit and Yves Orton.
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 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.
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.