NAME

perl5295delta - what is new for perl v5.29.5

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.29.4 release and the 5.29.5 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.29.3, first read perl5294delta, which describes differences between 5.29.3 and 5.29.4.

Core Enhancements

-Drv now means something on -DDEBUGGING builds

Now, adding the verbose flag (-Dv) to the -Dr flag turns on all possible regular expression debugging.

Performance Enhancements

• Regular expression pattern matching of things like qr/[^a]/ is significantly sped up, where a is any ASCII character. Which classes will get this speed up is complicated and depends on the underlying bit patterns of those characters, so differs between ASCII and EBCDIC platforms, but all case pairs, like qr/[Gg]/ are included, as is [^01].

Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules and Pragmata

• Data::Dumper has been upgraded from version 2.172 to 2.173.

• Errno has been upgraded from version 1.29 to 1.30.

• File::Spec has been upgraded from version 3.75 to 3.76.

• GDBM_File has been upgraded from version 1.17 to 1.18.

• Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20181020 to 5.20181120.

• NDBM_File has been upgraded from version 1.14 to 1.15.

• ODBM_File has been upgraded from version 1.15 to 1.16.

• re has been upgraded from version 0.36 to 0.37.

• SDBM_File has been upgraded from version 1.14 to 1.15.

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

• The entry for "-X" in perlfunc has been clarified to indicate that symbolic links are followed for most tests.

Configuration and Compilation

• Normally the thread-safe functions are used only on threaded builds. It is now possible to force their use on unthreaded builds on systems that have them available, by including the -Accflags='-DUSE_THREAD_SAFE_LOCALE' option to Configure.

Testing

Tests were added and changed to reflect the other additions and changes in this release.

Platform Support

Platform-Specific Notes

Mac OS X

Perl's build and testing process on Mac OS X for -Duseshrplib builds is now compatible with Mac OS X System Integrity Protection (SIP).

SIP prevents binaries in /bin (and a few other places) being passed the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. For our purposes this prevents DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH from being passed to the shell, which prevents that variable being passed to the testing or build process, so running perl couldn't find libperl.dylib.

To work around that, the initial build of the perl executable expects to find libperl.dylib in the build directory, and the library path is then adjusted during installation to point to the installed library.

[perl #126706]

Minix3

Some support for Minix3 has been re-added.

Selected Bug Fixes

• SDBM_File is now more robust with corrupt database files. The improvements do not make SDBM files suitable as an interchange format. [perl #132147]

• binmode($fh); or binmode($fh, ':raw'); now properly removes the :utf8 flag from the default :crlf I/O layer on Win32. [perl #133604]

• The experimental reference aliasing feature was misinterpreting array and hash slice assignment as being localised, e.g.

  \(@a[3,5,7]) = \(....);

  was being interpreted as:

  local \(@a[3,5,7]) = \(....);

  [perl #133538]

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.29.5 represents approximately 4 weeks of development since Perl 5.29.4 and contains approximately 4,000 lines of changes across 110 files from 18 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 2,600 lines of changes to 51 .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 5.29.5:

Aaron Crane, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Dan Dedrick, David Cantrell, David Mitchell, Dominic Hargreaves, H.Merijn Brand, James Clarke, James E Keenan, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Niko Tyni, Pali, Phil Pearl (Lobbes), Sawyer X, 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.

cpanm less

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install less