NAME¶
perl51310delta - what is new for perl v5.13.10
DESCRIPTION¶
This document describes differences between the 5.13.9 release and the 5.13.10
release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.13.8, first read
perl5139delta, which describes differences between 5.13.8 and 5.13.9.
Core Enhancements¶
Various releases of the 5.13.x series have added new regular expression
modifiers, "/a", "/d", "/l", and "/u".
They were only available in infix form (e.g., "(?a:...)") until this
release; now they are usable in suffix form. This change was made too late to
change all the affected documentation, so there are a number of places that
erroneously say these must be used in infix form.
However, there is an ambiguity with the construct, "s/foo/bar/le...".
Due to backward compatibility constraints, in Perl 5.14 only, it will be
resolved as "s/foo/bar/ le...", that is, as meaning to take the
result of the substitution, and see if it is stringwise less-than-or-equal-to
what follows. In Perl 5.16 and later, it will instead be resolved as meaning
to do the pattern match using the rules of the current locale, and evaluate
the rhs as an expression when doing the substitution. In 5.14, if you want the
latter interpretation, you can write "el" instead.
Add "\p{Titlecase}" as a synonym for
"\p{Title}"¶
This synonym is added for symmetry with the Unicode property names
"\p{Uppercase}" and "\p{Lowercase}".
New regular expression modifier option "/aa"¶
Doubling the "/a" regular expression modifier increases its effect, so
that in case-insensitive matching, no ASCII character will match a non-ASCII
character. For example, normally,
'k' =~ /\N{KELVIN SIGN}/i
will match; it won't under "/aa".
New warnings categories for problematic (non-)Unicode code
points.¶
Three new warnings subcategories of <utf8> have been added. These allow
you to turn off warnings for their covered events, while allowing the other
UTF-8 warnings to remain on. The three categories are: "surrogate"
when UTF-16 surrogates are encountered; "nonchar" when Unicode
non-character code points are encountered; and "non_unicode" when
code points that are above the legal Unicode maximum of 0x10FFFF are
encountered.
Incompatible Changes¶
Most "\p{}" properties are now immune from
case-insensitive matching¶
For most Unicode properties, it doesn't make sense to have them match
differently under "/i" case-insensitive matching than not. And doing
so leads to unexpected results and potential security holes. For example
m/\p{ASCII_Hex_Digit}+/i
could previously match non-ASCII characters because of the Unicode matching
rules. There were a number of bugs in this feature until an earlier release in
the 5.13 series. Now this release reverts, and removes the feature completely
except for the few properties where people have come to expect it, namely the
ones where casing is an integral part of their functionality, such as
"m/\p{Uppercase}/i" and "m/\p{Lowercase}/i", both of which
match the exact same code points, namely those matched by
"m/\p{Cased}/i". Details are in "Unicode Properties" in
perlrecharclass.
User-defined property handlers that need to match differently under
"/i" must change to read the new boolean parameter passed it which
is non-zero if case-insensitive matching is in effect; 0 if not. See
"User-Defined Character Properties" in perluniprops.
regex: \p{} in pattern implies Unicode semantics¶
Now, a Unicode property match specified in the pattern will indicate that the
pattern is meant for matching according to Unicode rules (e40e74f)
add GvCV_set() and GvGP_set() macros and change
GvGP()¶
This allows a future commit to eliminate some backref magic between GV and CVs,
which will require complete control over assignment to the gp_cv slot.
If you've been using
GvGP() in lvalue context this change will break your
code, you should use
GvGP_set() instead. (c43ae56)
_swash_inversion_hash is no longer exported as part of the
API¶
This function shouldn't be called from XS code. (4c2e113)
Unreferenced objects in global destruction¶
The fix for [perl #36347], which made sure that destructors were called on
unreferenced objects, broke the tests for three CPAN modules, which apparently
rely on the bug.
To provide more time for fixing them (as this is such a minor bug), we have
reverted the fix until after perl 5.14.0.
This resolves [perl #82542] and other related tickets.
"close" on shared pipes¶
The "close" function no longer waits for the child process to exit if
the underlying file descriptor is still in use by another thread, to avoid
deadlocks. It returns true in such cases.
Deprecations¶
- 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_14".
- Devel::DProf
- We strongly recommend that you install and used
Devel::NYTProf in preference, as it offers significantly improved
profiling and reporting.
User-defined case-mapping¶
This feature is being deprecated due to its many issues, as documented in
"User-Defined Case Mappings (for serious hackers only)" in
perlunicode. It is planned to remove this feature in Perl 5.16. A CPAN module
providing improved functionality is being prepared for release by the time
5.14 is.
Modules and Pragmata¶
New Modules and Pragmata¶
- •
- "CPAN::Meta" version 2.110440 has been added as a
dual-life module. It provides a standard library to read, interpret and
write CPAN distribution metadata files (e.g. META.json and META.yml) which
describes a distribution, its contents, and the requirements for building
it and installing it. The latest CPAN distribution metadata specification
is included as "CPAN::Meta::Spec" and notes on changes in the
specification over time are given in "CPAN::Meta::History".
- •
- "Version::Requirements" version 0.101020 has been
added as a dual-life module. It provides a standard library to model and
manipulates module prerequisites and version constraints as defined in the
CPAN::Meta::Spec.
Updated Modules and Pragmata¶
- •
- "B" has been upgraded from version 1.27 to
1.28.
- •
- "Carp" has been upgraded from version 1.19 to
1.20.
[perl #82854] It now avoids using regular expressions that cause perl to
load its Unicode tables, in order to avoid the 'BEGIN not safe after
errors' error that will ensue if there has been a syntax error.
- •
- "CGI" has been upgraded from version 3.51 to
3.52
- •
- "CPAN" has been upgraded from version 1.94_64 to
1.94_65
Includes support for META.json and MYMETA.json.
- •
- "CPANPLUS" has been upgraded from version 0.9011
to 0.9101
Includes support for META.json and MYMETA.json and a change to using
Digest::SHA for CPAN checksums.
- •
- "deprecate" has been upgraded from version 0.01
to 0.02.
- •
- "diagnostics" has been upgraded from version 1.21
to 1.22.
It now renders pod links slightly better, and has been taught to find
descriptions for messages that share their descriptions with other
messages.
- •
- "Devel::DProf" has been upgraded from version
20080331.00 to 20110217.00.
Merely loading "Devel::DProf" now no longer triggers profiling to
start. "use Devel::DProf" and "perl -d:DProf ..."
still behave as before and start the profiler.
NOTE: "Devel::DProf" is deprecated and will be removed from a
future version of Perl. We strongly recommend that you install and use
Devel::NYTProf instead, as it offers significantly improved profiling and
reporting.
- •
- "DynaLoader" has been upgraded from version 1.12
to 1.13.
[perl #84358] It no longer inherits from AutoLoader; hence it no longer
produces weird error messages for unsuccessful method calls on classes
that inherit from DynaLoader.
- •
- "IO::Select" has been upgraded from version 1.17
to 1.18.
It now allows IO::Handle objects (and objects in derived classes) to be
removed from an IO::Select set even if the underlying file descriptor is
closed or invalid.
- •
- "IPC::Cmd" has been upgraded from version 0.68 to
0.70
- •
- "HTTP::Tiny" has been upgraded from version 0.009
to 0.010
- •
- "Math::BigInt" has been upgraded from version
1.99_04 to 1.992.
- •
- "Module::Build" has been upgraded from version
0.3607 to 0.37_05.
A notable change is the deprecation of several modules.
Module::Build::Version has been deprecated and Module::Build now relies
directly upon version. Module::Build::ModuleInfo has been deprecated in
favor of a standalone copy of it called Module::Metadata.
Module::Build::YAML has been deprecated in favor of CPAN::Meta::YAML.
Module::Build now also generates META.json and MYMETA.json files in
accordance with version 2 of the CPAN distribution metadata specification,
CPAN::Meta::Spec. The older format META.yml and MYMETA.yml files are still
generated, as well.
- •
- "Module::Load::Conditional" has been upgraded
from version 0.40 to 0.44
- •
- "Module::Metadata" has been upgraded from version
1.000003 to 1.000004.
- •
- "overload" has been upgraded from version 1.12 to
1.13.
The documentation has greatly improved. See "Documentation"
below.
- •
- "Parse::CPAN::Meta" has been upgraded from
version 1.40 to 1.4401.
The latest Parse::CPAN::Meta can now read YAML or JSON files using
CPAN::Meta::YAML and JSON::PP, which are now part of the Perl core.
- •
- "re" has been upgraded from version 0.16 to 0.17.
It now supports the double-a flag: "use re '/aa';"
The "regmust" function used to crash when called on a regular
expression belonging to a pluggable engine. Now it has been disabled for
those.
"regmust" no longer leaks memory.
- •
- "Term::UI" has been upgraded from version 0.24 to
0.26
- •
- "Unicode::Collate" has been upgraded from version
0.68 to 0.72
This also sees the switch from using the pure-perl version of this module to
the XS version.`
- •
- "VMS::DCLsym" has been upgraded from version 1.04
to 1.05.
Two bugs have been fixed [perl #84086]:
The symbol table name was lost when tying a hash, due to a thinko in
"TIEHASH". The result was that all tied hashes interacted with
the local symbol table.
Unless a symbol table name had been explicitly specified in the call to the
constructor, querying the special key ':LOCAL' failed to identify objects
connected to the local symbol table.
- •
- Added new function "Unicode::UCD::num()". This
function will return the numeric value of the string passed it;
"undef" if the string in its entirety has no safe numeric value.
To be safe, a string must be a single character which has a numeric value,
or consist entirely of characters that match \d, coming from the same
Unicode block of digits. Thus, a mix of Bengali and Western digits would
be considered unsafe, as well as a mix of half- and full-width digits, but
strings consisting entirely of Devanagari digits or of "Mathematical
Bold" digits would would be safe.
- •
- "CPAN" has been upgraded from version 1.94_63 to
1.94_64.
Documentation¶
Changes to Existing Documentation¶
overload
- •
- overload's documentation has practically undergone a
rewrite. It is now much more straightforward and clear.
perlhack and perlrepository
- •
- The perlhack and perlrepository documents have been heavily
edited and split up into several new documents.
The perlhack document is now much shorter, and focuses on the Perl 5
development process and submitting patches to Perl. The technical content
has been moved to several new documents, perlsource, perlinterp,
perlhacktut, and perlhacktips. This technical content has only been
lightly edited.
The perlrepository document has been renamed to perlgit. This new document
is just a how-to on using git with the Perl source code. Any other content
that used to be in perlrepository has been moved to perlhack.
perlfunc
- •
- The documentation for the "map" function now
contains more examples, see perldoc -f map (f947627)
perlfaq4
- •
- Examples in perlfaq4 have been updated to show the use of
Time::Piece. (9243591)
Miscellaneous
- •
- Many POD related RT bugs and other issues which are too
numerous to enumerate have been solved by Michael Stevens.
Diagnostics¶
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.
New Diagnostics¶
- "\b{" is deprecated; use "\b\{"
instead
- "\B{" is deprecated; use "\B\{"
instead
- Use of an unescaped "{" immediately following a
"\b" or "\B" is now deprecated so as to reserve its
use for Perl itself in a future release.
- regcomp: Add warning if \p is used under locale.
(fb2e24c)
- "\p" implies Unicode matching rules, which are
likely going to be different than the locale's.
- panic: gp_free failed to free glob pointer - something is
repeatedly re-creating entries
- This new error is triggered if a destructor called on an
object in a typeglob that is being freed creates a new typeglob entry
containing an object with a destructor that creates a new entry containing
an object....
- refcnt: fd %d%s
- This new error only occurs if a internal consistency check
fails when a pipe is about to be closed.
Changes to Existing Diagnostics¶
- •
- The warning message about regex unrecognized escapes passed
through is changed to include any literal '{' following the 2-char escape.
e.g., "\q{" will include the { in the message as part of the
escape (216bfc0).
- •
- "binmode $fh, ':scalar'" no longer warns
(8250589)
Perl will now no longer produce this warning:
$ perl -we 'open my $f, ">", \my $x; binmode $f, "scalar"'
Use of uninitialized value in binmode at -e line 1.
Utility Changes¶
perlbug
- •
- [perl #82996] Use the user's from address as return-path in
perlbug
Many systems these days don't have a valid Internet domain name and
perlbug@perl.org does not accept email with a return-path that does not
resolve. Therefore pass the user's address to sendmail so it's less likely
to get stuck in a mail queue somewhere. (019cfd2)
Configuration and Compilation¶
- •
- make reg_eval_scope.t TODOs consistently fail (daaf7ac)
Some of the TODO tests in reg_eval_scope.t spuriously passed under
non-threaded builds. Make the tests harder so they always fail.
Since one of the key bugs in (?{..}) is the trashing of the parent pad, add
some extra lexical vars to the parent scope and check they're still there
at the end.
- •
- Stop EU::CBuilder's tests from failing in parallel
(cbf59d5)
It used to use the same paths for temporary files in all tests. This blew up
randomly when the tests were run in parallel.
Testing¶
- •
- porting/FindExt.t now skips all tests on a static
(-Uusedl) build of perl.
- •
- porting/FindExt.t now passes on non-Win32 platforms
when some extensions are built statically.
- Windows
- •
- The "test-prep" build target now depends on
pod/perltoc.pod to allow the t/porting/buildtoc.t test to
run successfully.
- MirBSD
- •
- [perl #82988] Skip hanging taint.t test on MirBSD 10
(1fb83d0)
Skip a hanging test under MirBSD that was already being skipped under
OpenBSD.
- •
- Previously if you build perl with a shared libperl.so on
MirBSD (the default config), it will work up to the installation; however,
once installed, it will be unable to find libperl. Treat path handling
like in the other BSD dialects.
Internal Changes¶
- •
- Fix harmless invalid read in Perl_re_compile()
(f6d9469)
[perl #2460] described a case where electric fence reported an invalid read.
This could be reproduced under valgrind with blead and -e'/x/', but only
on a non-debugging build.
This was because it was checking for certain pairs of nodes (e.g. BOL + END)
and wasn't allowing for EXACT nodes, which have the string at the next
node position when using a naive NEXTOPER(first). In the non-debugging
build, the nodes aren't initialised to zero, and a 1-char EXACT node isn't
long enough to spill into the type field of the "next node".
Fix this by only using NEXTOPER(first) when we know the first node is
kosher.
- •
- Break out the generated function Perl_keywords()
into keywords.c, a new file. (26ea9e1)
As it and Perl_yylex() both need FEATURE_IS_ENABLED,
feature_is_enabled() is no longer static, and the two macro
definitions move from toke.c to perl.h
Previously, one had to cut and paste the output of perl_keywords.pl into the
middle of toke.c, and it was not clear that it was generated code.
- •
- A lot of tests have been ported from Test to Test::More,
e.g. in 3842ad6.
- •
- Increase default PerlIO buffer size. (b83080d)
The previous default size of a PerlIO buffer (4096 bytes) has been increased
to the larger of 8192 bytes and your local BUFSIZ. Benchmarks show that
doubling this decade-old default increases read and write performance in
the neighborhood of 25% to 50% when using the default layers of perlio on
top of unix. To choose a non-default size, such as to get back the old
value or to obtain and even larger value, configure with:
./Configure -Accflags=-DPERLIOBUF_DEFAULT_BUFSIZ=N
where N is the desired size in bytes; it should probably be a multiple of
your page size.
Selected Bug Fixes¶
- •
- A Unicode "\p{}" property match in a regular
expression pattern will now force Unicode rules for the rest of the
regular expression
- •
- [perl #38456] binmode FH, ":crlf" only modifies
top crlf layer (7826b36)
When pushed on top of the stack, crlf will no longer enable crlf layers
lower in the stack. This will prevent unexpected results.
- •
- Fix 'raw' layer for RT #80764 (ecfd064)
Made a ':raw' open do what it advertises to do (first open the file, then
binmode it), instead of leaving off the top layer.
- •
- Use PerlIOBase_open for pop, utf8 and bytes layers
(c0888ac)
Three of Perl's builtin PerlIO layers (":pop", ":utf8"
and ":bytes") didn't allow stacking when opening a file. For
example this:
open FH, '>:pop:perlio', 'some.file' or die $!;
Would throw an error: "Invalid argument". This has been fixed in
this release.
- •
- An issue present since 5.13.1, where s/A/B/ with A utf8 and
B non-utf8, could cause corruption or segfaults has been fixed.
(c95ca9b)
- •
- String evals will no longer fail after 2 billion scopes
have been compiled (d1bfb64, 2df5bdd, 0d311cd and 6012dc8)
- •
- [perl #81750] When strict 'refs' mode is off,
"%{...}" in rvalue context returns "undef" if its
argument is undefined. An optimisation introduced in perl 5.12.0 to make
"keys %{...}" faster when used as a boolean did not take this
into account, causing "keys %{+undef}" (and "keys
%$foo" when $foo is undefined) to be an error, which it should only
be in strict mode.
- •
- [perl #83194] Combining the vector (%v) flag and dynamic
precision would cause sprintf to confuse the order of its arguments,
making it treat the string as the precision and vice versa.
- •
- [perl #77692] Sometimes the UTF8 length cache would not be
reset on a value returned by substr, causing
"length(substr($uni_string,...))" to give wrong answers. With
"${^UTF8CACHE}" set to -1, it would produce a 'panic' error
message, too.
- •
- During the restoration of a localised typeglob on scope
exit, any destructors called as a result would be able to see the typeglob
in an inconsistent state, containing freed entries, which could result in
a crash. This would affect code like this:
local *@;
eval { die bless [] }; # puts an object in $@
sub DESTROY {
local $@; # boom
}
Now the glob entries are cleared before any destructors are called. This
also means that destructors can vivify entries in the glob. So perl tries
again and, if the entries are re-created too many times, dies with a
'panic: gp_free...' error message.
- •
- [perl #78494] When pipes are shared between threads, the
"close" function (and any implicit close, such as on thread
exit) no longer blocks.
- •
- Several contexts no longer allow a Unicode character to
begin a word that should never begin words, for an example an accent that
must follow another character previously could precede all other
characters.
- •
- Case insensitive matching in regular expressions compiled
under "use locale" now works much more sanely when the pattern
and/or target string are encoded in UTF-8. Previously, under these
conditions the localeness was completely lost. Now, code points above 255
are treated as Unicode, but code points between 0 and 255 are treated
using the current locale rules, regardless of whether the pattern or
string are encoded in UTF-8. The few case insensitive matches that cross
the 255/256 boundary are not allowed. For example, 0xFF does not
caselessly match the character at 0x178, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH
DIAERESIS, because 0xFF may not be LATIN SMALL LETTER Y in the current
locale, and Perl has no way of knowing if that character even exists in
the locale, much less what code point it is.
Acknowledgements¶
Perl 5.13.10 represents approximately one month of development since Perl 5.13.9
and contains approximately 63000 lines of changes across 609 files from 38
authors and committers:
Abigail, Alexander Hartmaier, brian d foy, Charles Bailey, Chip Salzenberg,
Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Curtis Jewell, Dave Rolsky, David
Golden, David Leadbeater, David Mitchell, David Wheeler, Father Chrysostomos,
Florian Ragwitz, Franz Fasching, George Greer, H.Merijn Brand, Hongwen Qiu,
Hugo van der Sanden, Jay Hannah, Jesse Vincent, Karl Williamson, Larwan Berke,
Leon Timmermans, Michael Breen, Michael Stevens, Nicholas Clark, Noirin
Shirley, Paul Evans, Peter John Acklam, Ricardo Signes, Robin Barker, Steven
Schubiger, Tom Christiansen, Tony Cook, Zsban Ambrus and AEvar Arnfjoerd`
Bjarmason
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.