Ubuntu Manpage: perldelta - what is new for perl v5.22.1

Provided by: perl-doc_5.22.1-9ubuntu0.9_all

NAME

       perldelta - what is new for perl v5.22.1

DESCRIPTION

       This document describes differences between the 5.22.0 release and the 5.22.1 release.

       If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.20.0, first read perl5220delta,
       which describes differences between 5.20.0 and 5.22.0.

Incompatible Changes

       There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.20.0 other than the following
       single exception, which we deemed to be a sensible change to make in order to get the new
       "\b{wb}" and (in particular) "\b{sb}" features sane before people decided they're
       worthless because of bugs in their Perl 5.22.0 implementation and avoided them in the
       future.  If any others exist, they are bugs, and we request that you submit a report.  See
       "Reporting Bugs" below.

   Bounds Checking Constructs
       Several bugs, including a segmentation fault, have been fixed with the bounds checking
       constructs (introduced in Perl 5.22) "\b{gcb}", "\b{sb}", "\b{wb}", "\B{gcb}", "\B{sb}",
       and "\B{wb}".  All the "\B{}" ones now match an empty string; none of the "\b{}" ones do.
       [perl #126319] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126319>

Modules and Pragmata

   Updated Modules and Pragmata
       •   Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20150520 to 5.20151213.

       •   PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from version 0.22 to 0.23.

       •   POSIX has been upgraded from version 1.53 to 1.53_01.

           If "POSIX::strerror" was passed $! as its argument then it accidentally cleared $!.
           This has been fixed.  [perl #126229]
           <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126229>

       •   Storable has been upgraded from version 2.53 to 2.53_01.

       •   warnings has been upgraded from version 1.32 to 1.34.

           The "warnings::enabled" example now actually uses "warnings::enabled".  [perl #126051]
           <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126051>

       •   Win32 has been upgraded from version 0.51 to 0.52.

           This has been updated for Windows 8.1, 10 and 2012 R2 Server.

Documentation

   Changes to Existing Documentation
       perltie

       •   The usage of "FIRSTKEY" and "NEXTKEY" has been clarified.

       perlvar

       •   The specific true value of $!{E...} is now documented, noting that it is subject to
           change and not guaranteed.

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
       •   The "printf" and "sprintf" builtins are now more careful about the warnings they emit:
           argument reordering now disables the "redundant argument" warning in all cases.  [perl
           #125469] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=125469>

Configuration and Compilation

       •   Using the "NO_HASH_SEED" define in combination with the default hash algorithm
           "PERL_HASH_FUNC_ONE_AT_A_TIME_HARD" resulted in a fatal error while compiling the
           interpreter, since Perl 5.17.10.  This has been fixed.

       •   Configuring with ccflags containing quotes (e.g.
           "-Accflags='-DAPPLLIB_EXP=\"/usr/libperl\"'") was broken in Perl 5.22.0 but has now
           been fixed again.  [perl #125314] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=125314>

Platform Support

   Platform-Specific Notes
       IRIX
           •   Under some circumstances IRIX stdio fgetc() and fread() set the errno to "ENOENT",
               which made no sense according to either IRIX or POSIX docs.  Errno is now cleared
               in such cases.  [perl #123977] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123977>

           •   Problems when multiplying long doubles by infinity have been fixed.  [perl
               #126396] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126396>

           •   All tests pass now on IRIX with the default build configuration.

Selected Bug Fixes

       •   "qr/(?[ () ])/" no longer segfaults, giving a syntax error message instead.  [perl
           #125805] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=125805>

       •   Regular expression possessive quantifier Perl 5.20 regression now fixed.
           "qr/"PAT"{"min,max"}+""/" is supposed to behave identically to
           "qr/(?>"PAT"{"min,max"})/".  Since Perl 5.20, this didn't work if min and max were
           equal.  [perl #125825] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=125825>

       •   Certain syntax errors in "Extended Bracketed Character Classes" in perlrecharclass
           caused panics instead of the proper error message.  This has now been fixed.  [perl
           #126481] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126481>

       •   "BEGIN <>" no longer segfaults and properly produces an error message.  [perl #125341]
           <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=125341>

       •   A regression from Perl 5.20 has been fixed, in which some syntax errors in "(?[...])"
           constructs within regular expression patterns could cause a segfault instead of a
           proper error message.  [perl #126180]
           <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126180>

       •   Another problem with "(?[...])"  constructs has been fixed wherein things like "\c]"
           could cause panics.  [perl #126181]
           <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126181>

       •   In Perl 5.22.0, the logic changed when parsing a numeric parameter to the -C option,
           such that the successfully parsed number was not saved as the option value if it
           parsed to the end of the argument.  [perl #125381]
           <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=125381>

       •   Warning fatality is now ignored when rewinding the stack.  This prevents infinite
           recursion when the now fatal error also causes rewinding of the stack.  [perl #123398]
           <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123398>

       •   A crash with "%::=(); J->${\"::"}" has been fixed.  [perl #125541]
           <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=125541>

       •   Nested quantifiers such as "/.{1}??/" should cause perl to throw a fatal error, but
           were being silently accepted since Perl 5.20.0.  This has been fixed.  [perl #126253]
           <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126253>

       •   Regular expression sequences such as "/(?i/" (and similarly with other recognized
           flags or combination of flags) should cause perl to throw a fatal error, but were
           being silently accepted since Perl 5.18.0.  This has been fixed.  [perl #126178]
           <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126178>

       •   A bug in hexadecimal floating point literal support meant that high-order bits could
           be lost in cases where mantissa overflow was caused by too many trailing zeros in the
           fractional part.  This has been fixed.  [perl #126582]
           <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126582>

       •   Another hexadecimal floating point bug, causing low-order bits to be lost in cases
           where the last hexadecimal digit of the mantissa has bits straddling the limit of the
           number of bits allowed for the mantissa, has also been fixed.  [perl #126586]
           <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126586>

       •   Further hexadecimal floating point bugs have been fixed: In some circumstances, the %a
           format specifier could variously lose the sign of the negative zero, fail to display
           zeros after the radix point with the requested precision, or even lose the radix point
           after the leftmost hexadecimal digit completely.

       •   A crash caused by incomplete expressions within "/(?[ ])/" (e.g.  "/(?[[0]+()+])/")
           has been fixed.  [perl #126615] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126615>

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.22.1 represents approximately 6 months of development since Perl 5.22.0 and
contains approximately 19,000 lines of changes across 130 files from 27 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately
1,700 lines of changes to 44 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users
and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that
became Perl 5.22.1:

Aaron Crane, Abigail, Andy Broad, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Chase Whitener, Chris 'BinGOs'
Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel Dragan, David Mitchell, Father Chrysostomos, Herbert
Breunung, Hugo van der Sanden, James E Keenan, Jan Dubois, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Karen
Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Lukas Mai, Matthew Horsfall, Peter Martini, Rafael Garcia-
Suarez, Ricardo Signes, Shlomi Fish, Sisyphus, Steve Hay, Tony Cook, Victor Adam.

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 articles recently posted to the
       comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and 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 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 will 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.