First draft of the 5.12.1 perldelta

[perl5.git] / pod / perl5121delta.pod

=encoding utf8

=head1 NAME

perldelta - what is new for perl v5.12.1

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.12.0 release and
the 5.12.1 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.10.1, first read
L<perl5120delta>, which describes differences between 5.10.1 and
5.12.0.

=head1 Notice

XXX Any important notices here

=head1 Incompatible Changes

There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.0 If any
exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.


=head1 Core Enhancements

Other than the bug fixes listed below, there should be no user-visible
changes to the core langauge in this release.

=head1 Modules and Pragmata

=head2 New Modules and Pragmata

=head2 Pragmata Changes

=head2 Updated Modules

=head2 Removed Modules and Pragmata

=head1 Changes to Existing Documentation

XXX Changes which significantly change existing files in F<pod/> go here.
Any changes to F<pod/perldiag.pod> should go in L</New or Changed Diagnostics>.


=head1 Performance Enhancements

XXX Changes which enhance performance without changing behaviour go here. There
may well be none in a stable release.

=over 4

=item *

XXX

=back

=head1 Installation and Configuration Improvements

XXX Changes to F<Configure>, F<installperl>, F<installman>, and analogous tools
go here.

=head2 Configuration improvements

XXX

=head2 Compilation improvements

XXX

=head2 Platform Specific Changes

=over 4

=item XXX-some-platform

XXX

=back

=head1 Selected Bug Fixes

XXX Important bug fixes in the core language are summarised here.
Bug fixes in files in F<ext/> and F<lib/> are best summarised in
L</Modules and Pragmata>.

=over 4

=item *

XXX

=back

=head1 Changed Internals

XXX Changes which affect the interface available to C<XS> code go here.

=over 4

=item *

XXX

=back

=head1 Known Problems

XXX Descriptions of platform agnostic bugs we know we can't fix go here. Any
tests that had to be C<TODO>ed for the release would be noted here, unless
they were specific to a particular platform (see below).

This is a list of some significant unfixed bugs, which are regressions
from either 5.XXX.XXX or 5.XXX.XXX.

=over 4

=item *

XXX

=back

=head1 Platform Specific Notes

XXX Any changes specific to a particular platform. VMS and Win32 are the usual
stars here. It's probably best to group changes under the same section layout
as the main perldelta

=head1 Acknowledgements

XXX The list of people to thank goes here.


=head1 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 B<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 C<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.

=head1 SEE ALSO

The F<Changes> file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details
on what changed.

The F<INSTALL> file for how to build Perl.

The F<README> file for general stuff.

The F<Artistic> and F<Copying> files for copyright information.

=cut



=HEAD2 BUILD AND INSTALL

=item *

Ignore the /UU directory that exists during ./Configure

=HEAD2 DIAGNOSTICS

=item *

Added a missing explanation for a warning about C<:=> to L<perldiag.pod>

=head2 TEST FIXES

=item *

Fixes for 5.12.0 test failures in lib/blib.t and lib/locale.t on Darwin/PPC


=item *

    Fix a test failure in perl5db.t when Term::ReadLine::Gnu is installed


=item *
    Add fudge to timing checks on Windows
    
    sleep() time on Win32 may be rounded down to multiple of
    the clock tick interval.
    
    http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2010/03/msg157878.html



DOC 

=item *

Add the new maint policy to perlpolicy.pod

=item *

We've clarified the multiple-angle-bracked construct in the spec for POD

=item * 

    Nits in perlunifaq.pod

=item *

    Update title of "Supported Platforms" in perlport to avoid
    breaking pod links at each perl release (spotted by Karl Williamson)

=item * 
    [perl #74808] Carp.pm POD error
    
    The documentation incorrectly states that the $Carp::Verbose
    variable makes cluck generate stack backtraces.  cluck
    already generates stack backtraces.  It should say that
    the variable makes croak generate stack backtraces.



=item *

Fix F<a2p> example in L<perlutil.pod>


=item  *

Fill blank with the release date of 5.12 in perlport.pod

=item  *

Fix broken links in perldelta files
=item *

Typo fixes in Pod::Functions
=item *

    Add POD index entries for sitecustomize and sitecustomize.pl


=item * 
    Replace mention of Switch.pm with given/when
=item *

    Improve documentation about sitecustomize.pl.
    
=item * 
    Reintroduce a lot of missing modules into perlmodlib.pod
    
    That was due to the great move of dual-life modules into cpan/ and
    dist/. This fixes the bug: [perl #74332] lots of modules missing from
    perlmodlib.

=item * 

POD tweak to 'require' in perlfunc relating to putting Perl code in @INC

=item *
    Reinstate some documentation about quotemeta
    (that was removed in 8bdbc703cb0af3faf2163ebce618944c51f180a0)

=item *
    [perl #74856] Fix POD syntax in perlapi

=item *

    Remove false statement about Unicode strings
    It is simply not true that all text strings are Unicode strings in Perl.

=item *
    GitHub's mirror is now at mirrors/perl, not github/perl
=item *
    Fix a minor perl5114delta error.

PLATFORM AIX 4.2

=item * 

    [PATCH] [5.12] Allow build on aix 4.2 (sigaction and IPv6)
    
    Based on a patch by AUGUSTE-ETIENNE José <jose.auguste-etienne@cgss-guyane.fr>
    
    The attached patches are necessary to work around aix 4.2 lack of support for IPv6,
    and limited support for POSIX sigaction()
    
    The hints/aix_4.sh patch solves the following build failure:
    
    "Socket.xs", line 468.16: 1506-007 (S) "struct in6_addr" is undefined.
    
    The ext/POSIX/t/sigaction.t patch solves the failing test reported a looong time ago:
    
    http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-01/msg01124.html
    
    After testing a simple C program using POSIX sigaction() with SA_SIGINFO,
    I found that it worked on aix 4.3 but failed on aix 4.2.
    
    I think it's safe to skip the SA_SIGINFO test on the aix 4.2 platform.
    
    perl 5.12.0 builds fine on the following platforms / C compiler :
    
    aix 4.2.1 / vac 5.0.2.7 (with attached patches)
    aix 4.3.2 / gcc 2.95.3
    aix 4.3.3 / vac 4.4.0.3
    aix 4.3.3 / vac 5.0.28
    aix 5.2 / GNUpro gcc 2.9.aix51.020209
    
    The atatched patches should be applied to blead and maint.



Platform FreeBSD
=item * 
    FreeBSD 7+ no longer contains /usr/bin/objformat, so the following
    (harmless) following error message is printed when hints are run:
    
    ./hints/freebsd.sh: /usr/bin/objformat: not found
    
    The reason for this is outlined in this email from Feb 2007
    http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2007-February/038523.html
    
    This patch just skips the objformat check for versions 7+ and
    assumes ELF.  (The end result is unchanged, but the error
    message will not be printed anymore.)

PLATFORMS VMS

=item *
    Allow extension building on older (pre 7.3-2) VMS systems.
    
    DCL symbol length was limited to 1K up until about seven years or
    so ago, but there was no particularly deep reason to prevent those
    older systems from configuring and building Perl.


=item *

    Fix broken -Uuseperlio build on VMS.
    
    We were checking a variable that doesn't exist in the non-default
    case of disabling perlio.  Now we only look at it when it exists.

=item *(

    Fix -Uuseperlio command-line option in configure.com.
    
    Formerly it only worked if you went through all the questions
    interactively and explicitly answered no.
    (cherry picked from commit 839d17582bad556c85fba50bb136d1c1fa878a54)
commit bd94fa25a8ae3c7107bd1aec68d4488d21c79b05
Author: Nicholas Clark <nick@ccl4.org>
Date:   Mon Apr 19 15:35:59 2010 +0100

    Possible undefined behaviour, spotted by gcc 4.5.0 and HP's updated compiler.

PLATFORM SUSE?

=item * 

    Note how to deal with broken dbm.h on OpenSUSE
    (cherry picked from commit 1bb125e2afe6197deaf55852a3f8a9c52736bfdc)


PLATFORM HPUX

=item *
    Allow -Duse64bitint without promoting to use64bitall on HP-UX
    
    Fix for http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=17736
    (cherry picked from commit 064b70ffe2beced36b4693cdd2a8e2cbd2139b47)


Module Updates



=item *

    fix version::is_strict/is_lax exporting
    
    These were being exported with a wrapper that treated them as method
    calls, which causes them to fail.  They are just functions, are
    documented as such, and should never be subclassed, so this patch
    just exports them directly as functions without the wrapper.



=item *

    Upgrade to CGI.pm 3.49

    TODO WHY

=item *

    import Pod-Simple 3.14 for C<< >> fix


=HEAD2 Release Engineering

=item *

Teach bump-perl-version about "libperl511.a"



commit 72c7417ae4c0cbb91b46622e0657f57469f025f8
Author: Jan Dubois <jand@activestate.com>
Date:   Fri Mar 5 15:24:17 2010 -0800

    Apply minimal patch for Perl bug 72704.
    
    Arguments to fputc() and fputs() are reversed on Windows.
    
    http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=72704

=HEAD2 Internals

=item * 

utf8::is_utf8 now respects respect GMAGIC (e.g. $1)

commit 349476ba0aabe6945fe0b234090937e992e7b95d

    Fix [perl #74542] 5.12.0 crash on diverse platforms
    
    Filetest ops don't always expect an op on the stack, so we should use
    TOPs only if we're sure that we're not stat'ing the _ filehandle.
    This is indicated by OPf_KIDS (as checked in ck_ftst).

commit 5e8d0adeb52de899a2c0954a747fe56eda402bed
Author: Zefram <zefram@fysh.org>
Date:   Fri Apr 30 00:02:06 2010 +0100

    put package declaration before label in deparsing
    
    When deparsing a nextstate op that has both a change of package (relative
    to the previous nextstate) and a label, the package declaration must be
    emitted first, because it is syntactically impermissible for a label to
    prefix a package declaration.
    (cherry picked from commit 98a1a1376eb18f3329f6d272d4dc3e9a7780689f)


commit e560917618a7d70a9f3420f75c62e08872bf97b5
Author: Jan Dubois <jand@activestate.com>
Date:   Wed Apr 21 16:49:09 2010 -0700

    XSUB.h is supposed to redefine fgets under PERL_IMPLICIT_SYS, but doesn't.
    
    See also http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=55049
    with workaround in http://code.google.com/p/perl-devel-nytprof/source/detail?r=1168
    (cherry picked from commit 20c8f8f9118fd23081c818637815bf1aab60b808)