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NAME

perl5292delta - what is new for perl v5.29.2

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.29.1 release and the 5.29.2 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.29.0, first read perl5291delta, which describes differences between 5.29.0 and 5.29.1.

Core Enhancements

Unicode 11.0 is supported

For details, see https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode11.0.0/.

The Word_Break property, as in past Perl releases, remains tailored to behave more in line with expectations of Perl users. This means that sequential runs of horizontal white space characters are not broken apart, but kept as a single run. Unicode 11 changed from past versions to be more in line with Perl, but it left several white space characters as causing breaks: TAB, NO BREAK SPACE, and FIGURE SPACE (U+2007). We have decided to continue to use the previous Perl tailoring with regards to these.

As of July 2018, another aspect of Unicode 11.0 is causing problems, and that is the changing the Georgian script to have both lower and uppercase letters. It turns out that many devices do not have fonts installed that can display the new uppercase letters, and people using Georgian are finding their text more or less illegible. It is being suggested that implementations delay their adoption of this portion of 11.0.

But since the next stable release of Perl is almost a year away, this aspect of 11.0 is being left in, with the option to back it out if things haven't improved by that time, or if we get too many complaints about the development release being unusable for Georgian users.

Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules and Pragmata

Platform-Specific Notes

Win32
  • sleep() with warnings enabled for a USE_IMP_SYS build no longer warns about the sleep timeout being too large. [perl #133376]

Selected Bug Fixes

  • The new in-place editing code no longer leaks directory handles. [perl #133314]

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.29.2 represents approximately 4 weeks of development since Perl 5.29.1 and contains approximately 59,000 lines of changes across 240 files from 15 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 47,000 lines of changes to 130 .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 5.29.2:

Aaron Crane, Chad Granum, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel Dragan, David Mitchell, H.Merijn Brand, James E Keenan, Karl Williamson, Sawyer X, Sisyphus, Steve Hay, Tomasz Konojacki, Tony Cook, Unicode Consortium.

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.