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NAME

perldelta - what is new for perl v5.29.10

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.29.9 release and the 5.29.10 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.29.8, first read perl5299delta, which describes differences between 5.29.8 and 5.29.9.

Core Enhancements

Perl now supports draft Unicode 12.1

Unicode 12.1 differs from 12.0 only in the addition of a single character, that for the new Japanese era name. The intent is to ship Perl 5.30 with Unicode 12.1. The final release of 12.1 is scheduled for May 7, 2019. Hopefully, there won't be any code changes to the draft after the release of Perl 5.29.10.

Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules and Pragmata

  • Data::Dumper has been upgraded from version 2.173 to 2.174.

    Data::Dumper now avoids leak when croaking.

  • ExtUtils::CBuilder has been upgraded from version 0.280230 to 0.280231.

  • File::Spec has been upgraded from version 3.77 to 3.78.

    Silence Cwd warning on Android builds if targetsh is not defined.

  • I18N::Langinfo has been upgraded from version 0.17 to 0.18.

  • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.20190320 to 5.20190420.

  • Module::Metadata has been upgraded from version 1.000033 to 1.000036.

    Properly clean up temporary directories after testing.

  • POSIX has been upgraded from version 1.87 to 1.88.

  • Storable has been upgraded from version 3.14 to 3.15.

Platform Support

Platform-Specific Notes

Windows
  • Support for compiling perl on Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 (containing Visual C++ 14.2) has been added.

Internal Changes

  • A new function "my_strtod" in perlapi or its synonym, Strtod(), is now available with the same signature as the libc strtod(). It provides strotod() equivalent behavior on all platforms, using the best available precision, depending on platform capabilities and Configure options, while handling locale-related issues, such as if the radix character should be a dot or comma.

Selected Bug Fixes

  • Perl now exposes POSIX getcwd as Internals::getcwd() if available. This is intended for use by Cwd.pm during bootstrapping and may be removed or changed without notice. This fixes some bootstrapping issues while building perl in a directory where some ancestor directory isn't readable. [perl #133951]

Errata From Previous Releases

  • The perldelta for 5.29.9 listed the enhancement about regular expression lookbehind in the Security section rather than the Core Enhancements section. Its title should also have indicated that it is "Limited" variable-length lookbehind (up to 255 characters). (Note that a technique has now been published to achieve arbitrary variable length lookbehind with pre-existing Perl constructs and is linked to in perlre. It is http://www.drregex.com/2019/02/variable-length-lookbehinds-actually.html.)

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.29.10 represents approximately 4 weeks of development since Perl 5.29.9 and contains approximately 29,000 lines of changes across 230 files from 19 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 21,000 lines of changes to 98 .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 5.29.10:

Alberto Simões, Brian Greenfield, Dan Book, David Mitchell, Ed J, Hugo van der Sanden, James E Keenan, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Niko Tyni, Richard Leach, Sawyer X, Sisyphus, Steve Hay, Tomasz Konojacki, Tom Wyant, Tony Cook, Unicode Consortium, Zak B. Elep.

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.