/ 
perl-5.29.10
River stage five • 11849 direct dependents • 33721 total dependents
/ perl5296delta

NAME

perl5296delta - what is new for perl v5.29.6

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.29.5 release and the 5.29.6 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.29.4, first read perl5295delta, which describes differences between 5.29.4 and 5.29.5.

Security

[CVE-2018-18312] Heap-buffer-overflow write in S_regatom (regcomp.c)

A crafted regular expression could cause heap-buffer-overflow write during compilation, potentially allowing arbitrary code execution. (This was actually fixed in 5.29.4, but not announced as a security fix at the time). [perl #133423]

Performance Enhancements

Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules and Pragmata

  • Config::Perl::V. has been upgraded from version 0.30 to 0.32. This was due to a new configuration variable that has influence on binary compatibility: USE_THREAD_SAFE_LOCALE.

  • ExtUtils::ParseXS has been upgraded from version 3.39 to 3.40. OUTLIST parameters are no longer incorrectly included in the automatically generated function prototype. [perl #133654].

  • File::Find has been upgraded from version 1.34 to 1.35. $File::Find::dont_use_nlink now defaults to 1 on all platforms. [perl #133673].

  • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20181120 to 5.20181218.

  • POSIX has been upgraded from version 1.85 to 1.86.

  • Storable has been upgraded from version 3.13 to 3.14.

    Storable no longer probes for recursion limits at build time. [perl #133708] and others.

    Metasploit exploit code was included to test for CVE-2015-1992 detection, this caused anti-virus detections on at least one AV suite. The exploit code has been removed and replaced with a simple functional test. [perl #133706]

  • Test::Simple has been upgraded from version 1.302140 to 1.302141.

  • threads::shared has been upgraded from version 1.58 to 1.59.

Documentation

Changes to Existing Documentation

We have attempted to update the documentation to reflect the changes listed in this document. If you find any we have missed, send email to perlbug@perl.org.

Additionally, the following selected changes have been made:

perlfunc

  • Clarification of behaviour of reset EXPR.

perlreref

  • Clarification of the syntax of /(?(cond)yes)/.

perlop

  • We no longer have null (empty line) here doc terminators, so perlop should not refer to them.

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.

Changes to Existing Diagnostics

  • Under -Dr (or use re 'Debug') the compiled regex engine program is displayed. It used two different spellings for infinity, INFINITY, and INFTY. It now uses the latter exclusively, as that spelling has been around the longest.

Utility Changes

xsubpp

  • The generated prototype (with PROTOTYPES: ENABLE) would include OUTLIST parameters, but these aren't arguments to the perl function. This has been rectified. [perl #133654].

Testing

Tests were added and changed to reflect the other additions and changes in this release. Furthermore, these significant changes were made:

  • Some tests in t/io/eintr.t caused the process to hang on pre-16 Darwin. These tests are skipped for those version of Darwin.

Platform Support

Platform-Specific Notes

Cygwin

Cygwin doesn't make cuserid visible.

Win32 Mingw

C99 math functions are now available.

Internal Changes

  • Two new regnodes have been introduced EXACT_ONLY8, and EXACTFU_ONLY8. They're equivalent to EXACT and EXACTFU, except that they contain a code point which requires UTF-8 to represent/match. Hence, if the target string isn't UTF-8, we know it can't possibly match, without needing to try.

  • print_bytes_for_locale() is now defined if DEBUGGING, Prior, it didn't get defined unless LC_COLLATE was defined on the platform.

Selected Bug Fixes

  • If an in-place edit is still in progress during global destruction and the process exit code (as stored in $?) is zero, perl will now treat the in-place edit as successful, replacing the input file with any output produced.

    This allows code like:

    perl -i -ne 'print "Foo"; last'

    to replace the input file, while code like:

    perl -i -ne 'print "Foo"; die'

    will not. Partly resolves [perl #133659].

  • A regression in 5.28 caused the following code to fail

    close(STDIN); open(CHILD, "|wc -l")'

    because the child's stdin would be closed on exec. This has now been fixed.

  • Fixed an issue where compiling a regexp containing both compile-time and run-time code blocks could lead to trying to compile something which is invalid syntax.

  • Fixed build failures with -DNO_LOCALE_NUMERIC and -DNO_LOCALE_COLLATE. [perl #133696].

  • Prevent the tests in ext/B/t/strict.t from being skipped. [perl #133713].

  • /di nodes ending or beginning in s are now EXACTF. We do not want two EXACTFU to be joined together during optimization, and to form a ss, sS, Ss or SS sequence; they are the only multi-character sequences which may match differently under /ui and /di.

Errata From Previous Releases

  • The upper limit "n" specifiable in a regular expression quantifier of the form "{m,n}" has been doubled to 65534.

    The meaning of an unbounded upper quantifier "{m,}" remains unchanged. It matches 2**31 - 1 times on most platforms, and more on ones where a C language short variable is more than 4 bytes long.

    The text above is what perl5294delta should have said. Instead it said "The maximum number of times a pattern can match has been doubled to 65535" That statement was wrong. Try to forget you ever saw it.

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.29.6 represents approximately 4 weeks of development since Perl 5.29.5 and contains approximately 5,000 lines of changes across 230 files from 19 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 2,600 lines of changes to 150 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.29.6:

Aaron Crane, Abigail, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, David Mitchell, Dominic Hargreaves, E. Choroba, Eugen Konkov, H.Merijn Brand, James E Keenan, Jerry D. Hedden, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Leon Timmermans, Niko Tyni, Petr Písař, Sisyphus, Steve Hay, Tomasz Konojacki, Tony Cook.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically generated from version control history. In particular, it does not include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

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.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

Reporting Bugs

If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the perl bug database at https://rt.perl.org/. 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 see "SECURITY VULNERABILITY CONTACT INFORMATION" in perlsec for details of how to report the issue.

Give Thanks

If you wish to thank the Perl 5 Porters for the work we had done in Perl 5, you can do so by running the perlthanks program:

perlthanks

This will send an email to the Perl 5 Porters list with your show of thanks.

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.