NAME

perldelta - what is new for perl v5.29.7

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.29.6 release and the 5.29.7 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.29.5, first read perl5296delta, which describes differences between 5.29.5 and 5.29.6.

Deprecations

In XS code, use of various macros dealing with UTF-8.

This deprecation was scheduled to become fatal in 5.30, but has been delayed to 5.32 due to problems that showed up with some CPAN modules. For details of what's affected, see perldeprecation.

Performance Enhancements

  • A handful of small optimizations related to character folding and character classes in regular expressions.

Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules and Pragmata

  • Compress::Raw::Bzip2 has been upgraded from version 2.081 to 2.084.

  • Compress::Raw::Zlib has been upgraded from version 2.081 to 2.084.

  • CPAN has been upgraded from version 2.21 to 2.22.

  • DB_File has been upgraded from version 1.842 to 1.843.

  • File::Find has been upgraded from version 1.35 to 1.36.

    Variables $Is_Win32 and $Is_VMS are being initialized.

  • File::Spec has been upgraded from version 3.76 to 3.77.

  • File::Temp has been upgraded from version 0.2308 to 0.2309.

  • IO-Compress has been upgraded from version 2.081 to 2.084.

    Adds support for IO::Uncompress::Zstd and IO::Uncompress::UnLzip.

    The BinModeIn and BinModeOut options are now no-ops. ALL files will be read/written in binmode.

  • lib has been upgraded from version 0.64 to 0.65.

  • Math::BigInt has been upgraded from version 1.999813 to 1.999816.

    bnok() now supports the full Kronenburg extension. [cpan #95628].

  • Math::BigInt::FastCalc has been upgraded from version 0.5007 to 0.5008.

  • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20181218 to 5.20190120.

  • Test::Simple has been upgraded from version 1.302141 to 1.302160.

  • Unicode::Collate has been upgraded from version 1.25 to 1.27.

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:

perlvar

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

Testing

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

  • Fix intermittent tests which failed due to race conditions which surface during parallel testing. [perl #133740].

  • Thoroughly test paragraph mode, using a new test file, t/io/paragraph_mode.t. [perl #133722].

Selected Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a failure to match properly.

    An EXACTFish regnode has a finite length it can hold for the string being matched. If that length is exceeded, a second node is used for the next segment of the string, for as many regnodes as are needed. Care has to be taken where to break the string, in order to deal multi-character folds in Unicode correctly. If we want to break a string at a place which could potentially be in the middle of a multi-character fold, we back off one (or more) characters, leaving a shorter EXACTFish regnode. This backing off mechanism contained an off-by-one error. [perl #133756].

  • A bare eof call with no previous file handle now returns true. [perl #133721]

  • Failing to compile a format now aborts compilation. Like other errors in sub-parses this could leave the parser in a strange state, possibly crashing perl if compilation continued. [perl #132158]

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.29.7 represents approximately 5 weeks of development since Perl 5.29.6 and contains approximately 97,000 lines of changes across 350 files from 8 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 27,000 lines of changes to 190 .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 5.29.7:

Abigail, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Eugen Konkov, Hauke D, James E Keenan, Karl Williamson, 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.