{ "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "# PERL5202DELTA (man)\n\n## NAME\n\nperl5202delta - what is new for perl v5.20.2\n\n## DESCRIPTION\n\nThis document describes differences between the 5.20.1 release and the 5.20.2 release.\n\n## Sections\n\n- **NAME**\n- **DESCRIPTION** (3 subsections)\n- **Documentation** (2 subsections)\n- **Diagnostics** (1 subsections)\n- **Testing** (5 subsections)\n- **Acknowledgements** (1 subsections)\n- **SEE ALSO**\n\nUse structuredContent.sections for detailed options, examples, and full documentation.\n" } ], "structuredContent": { "command": "PERL5202DELTA", "section": "", "mode": "man", "summary": "perl5202delta - what is new for perl v5.20.2", "synopsis": null, "tldr_summary": null, "tldr_examples": [], "tldr_source": null, "flags": [], "examples": [], "see_also": [], "section_outline": [ { "name": "NAME", "lines": 2, "subsections": [] }, { "name": "DESCRIPTION", "lines": 5, "subsections": [ { "name": "Incompatible Changes", "lines": 3 }, { "name": "Modules and Pragmata", "lines": 1 }, { "name": "Updated Modules and Pragmata", "lines": 55 } ] }, { "name": "Documentation", "lines": 1, "subsections": [ { "name": "New Documentation", "lines": 4 }, { "name": "Changes to Existing Documentation", "lines": 15 } ] }, { "name": "Diagnostics", "lines": 3, "subsections": [ { "name": "Changes to Existing Diagnostics", "lines": 6 } ] }, { "name": "Testing", "lines": 3, "subsections": [ { "name": "Platform Support", "lines": 1 }, { "name": "Regained Platforms", "lines": 2 }, { "name": "Selected Bug Fixes", "lines": 75 }, { "name": "Known Problems", "lines": 3 }, { "name": "Errata From Previous Releases", "lines": 5 } ] }, { "name": "Acknowledgements", "lines": 27, "subsections": [ { "name": "Reporting Bugs", "lines": 17 } ] }, { "name": "SEE ALSO", "lines": 11, "subsections": [] } ], "sections": { "NAME": { "content": "perl5202delta - what is new for perl v5.20.2\n", "subsections": [] }, "DESCRIPTION": { "content": "This document describes differences between the 5.20.1 release and the 5.20.2 release.\n\nIf you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.20.0, first read perl5201delta, which\ndescribes differences between 5.20.0 and 5.20.1.\n", "subsections": [ { "name": "Incompatible Changes", "content": "There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.20.1. If any exist, they are bugs,\nand we request that you submit a report. See \"Reporting Bugs\" below.\n" }, { "name": "Modules and Pragmata", "content": "" }, { "name": "Updated Modules and Pragmata", "content": "• attributes has been upgraded from version 0.22 to 0.23.\n\nThe usage of \"memEQs\" in the XS has been corrected. [GH #14072]\n\n\n• Data::Dumper has been upgraded from version 2.151 to 2.15101.\n\nFixes CVE-2014-4330 by adding a configuration variable/option to limit recursion when\ndumping deep data structures.\n\n• Errno has been upgraded from version 1.2003 to 1.2005.\n\nWarnings when building the XS on Windows with the Visual C++ compiler are now avoided.\n\n• feature has been upgraded from version 1.36 to 1.3601.\n\nThe \"postderef\" feature has now been documented. This feature was actually added in Perl\n5.20.0 but was accidentally omitted from the feature documentation until now.\n\n• IO::Socket has been upgraded from version 1.37 to 1.38.\n\nDocument the limitations of the connected() method. [GH #14199]\n\n\n• Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 5.020001 to 5.20150214.\n\nThe list of Perl versions covered has been updated.\n\n• PathTools has been upgraded from version 3.48 to 3.4801.\n\nA warning from the gcc compiler is now avoided when building the XS.\n\n• PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from version 0.18 to 0.1801.\n\nReading from a position well past the end of the scalar now correctly returns end of\nfile. [GH #14342] \n\nSeeking to a negative position still fails, but no longer leaves the file position set to\na negation location.\n\n\"eof()\" on a \"PerlIO::scalar\" handle now properly returns true when the file position is\npast the 2GB mark on 32-bit systems.\n\n• Storable has been upgraded from version 2.49 to 2.4901.\n\nMinor grammatical change to the documentation only.\n\n• VMS::DCLsym has been upgraded from version 1.05 to 1.0501.\n\nMinor formatting change to the documentation only.\n\n• VMS::Stdio has been upgraded from version 2.4 to 2.41.\n\nMinor formatting change to the documentation only.\n" } ] }, "Documentation": { "content": "", "subsections": [ { "name": "New Documentation", "content": "perlunicook\n\nThis document, by Tom Christiansen, provides examples of handling Unicode in Perl.\n" }, { "name": "Changes to Existing Documentation", "content": "perlexperiment\n\n• Added reference to subroutine signatures. This feature was actually added in Perl 5.20.0\nbut was accidentally omitted from the experimental feature documentation until now.\n\nperlpolicy\n\n• The process whereby features may graduate from experimental status has now been formally\ndocumented.\n\nperlsyn\n\n• An ambiguity in the documentation of the ellipsis statement has been corrected. [GH\n#14054] \n" } ] }, "Diagnostics": { "content": "The following additions or changes have been made to diagnostic output, including warnings\nand fatal error messages. For the complete list of diagnostic messages, see perldiag.\n", "subsections": [ { "name": "Changes to Existing Diagnostics", "content": "• Bad symbol for scalar is now documented. This error is not new, but was not previously\ndocumented here.\n\n• Missing right brace on \\N{} is now documented. This error is not new, but was not\npreviously documented here.\n" } ] }, "Testing": { "content": "• The test script re/rt122747.t has been added to verify that [GH #14081]\n remains fixed.\n", "subsections": [ { "name": "Platform Support", "content": "" }, { "name": "Regained Platforms", "content": "IRIX and Tru64 platforms are working again. (Some \"make test\" failures remain.)\n" }, { "name": "Selected Bug Fixes", "content": "• AIX now sets the length in \"getsockopt\" correctly. [GH #13484]\n, [cpan #91183]\n, [cpan #85570]\n\n\n• In Perl 5.20.0, $^N accidentally had the internal UTF8 flag turned off if accessed from a\ncode block within a regular expression, effectively UTF8-encoding the value. This has\nbeen fixed. [GH #14211] \n\n• Various cases where the name of a sub is used (autoload, overloading, error messages)\nused to crash for lexical subs, but have been fixed.\n\n• An assertion failure when parsing \"sort\" with debugging enabled has been fixed. [GH\n#14087] \n\n• Loading UTF8 tables during a regular expression match could cause assertion failures\nunder debugging builds if the previous match used the very same regular expression. [GH\n#14081] \n\n• Due to a mistake in the string-copying logic, copying the value of a state variable could\ninstead steal the value and undefine the variable. This bug, introduced in Perl 5.20,\nwould happen mostly for long strings (1250 chars or more), but could happen for any\nstrings under builds with copy-on-write disabled. [GH #14175]\n\n\n• Fixed a bug that could cause perl to execute an infinite loop during compilation. [GH\n#14165] \n\n• On Win32, restoring in a child pseudo-process a variable that was \"local()\"ed in a parent\npseudo-process before the \"fork\" happened caused memory corruption and a crash in the\nchild pseudo-process (and therefore OS process). [GH #8641]\n\n\n• Tainted constants evaluated at compile time no longer cause unrelated statements to\nbecome tainted. [GH #14059] \n\n• Calling \"write\" on a format with a \"^\" field could produce a panic in svchop() if\nthere were insufficient arguments or if the variable used to fill the field was empty.\n[GH #14255] \n\n• In Perl 5.20.0, \"sort CORE::fake\" where 'fake' is anything other than a keyword started\nchopping of the last 6 characters and treating the result as a sort sub name. The\nprevious behaviour of treating \"CORE::fake\" as a sort sub name has been restored. [GH\n#14323] \n\n• A bug in regular expression patterns that could lead to segfaults and other crashes has\nbeen fixed. This occurred only in patterns compiled with \"/i\", while taking into account\nthe current POSIX locale (this usually means they have to be compiled within the scope of\n\"use locale\"), and there must be a string of at least 128 consecutive bytes to match.\n[GH #14389] \n\n• \"qr/@array(?{block})/\" no longer dies with \"Bizarre copy of ARRAY\". [GH #14292]\n\n\n• \"gmtime\" no longer crashes with not-a-number values. [GH #14365]\n\n\n• Certain syntax errors in substitutions, such as \"s/${<>{})//\", would crash, and had done\nso since Perl 5.10. (In some cases the crash did not start happening until Perl 5.16.)\nThe crash has, of course, been fixed. [GH #14391]\n\n\n• A memory leak in some regular expressions, introduced in Perl 5.20.1, has been fixed.\n[GH #14236] \n\n• \"formline(\"@...\", \"a\");\" would crash. The \"FFCHECKNL\" case in ppformline() didn't set\nthe pointer used to mark the chop position, which led to the \"FFMORE\" case crashing with\na segmentation fault. This has been fixed. [GH #14388]\n [GH #14425]\n\n\n• A possible buffer overrun and crash when parsing a literal pattern during regular\nexpression compilation has been fixed. [GH #14416]\n\n" }, { "name": "Known Problems", "content": "• It is a known bug that lexical subroutines cannot be used as the \"SUBNAME\" argument to\n\"sort\". This will be fixed in a future version of Perl.\n" }, { "name": "Errata From Previous Releases", "content": "• A regression has been fixed that was introduced in Perl 5.20.0 (fixed in Perl 5.20.1 as\nwell as here) in which a UTF-8 encoded regular expression pattern that contains a single\nASCII lowercase letter does not match its uppercase counterpart. [GH #14051]\n\n" } ] }, "Acknowledgements": { "content": "Perl 5.20.2 represents approximately 5 months of development since Perl 5.20.1 and contains\napproximately 6,300 lines of changes across 170 files from 34 authors.\n\nExcluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately\n1,900 lines of changes to 80 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.\n\nPerl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and\ndevelopers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became\nPerl 5.20.2:\n\nAaron Crane, Abigail, Andreas Voegele, Andy Dougherty, Anthony Heading, Aristotle Pagaltzis,\nChris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel Dragan, Doug Bell, Ed J, Father Chrysostomos,\nGlenn D. Golden, H.Merijn Brand, Hugo van der Sanden, James E Keenan, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Jim\nCromie, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, kmx, Matthew Horsfall, Max Maischein, Peter\nMartini, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Ricardo Signes, Shlomi Fish, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Müller,\nSteve Hay, Tadeusz Sośnierz, Tony Cook, Yves Orton, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason.\n\nThe list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically generated from version\ncontrol history. In particular, it does not include the names of the (very much appreciated)\ncontributors who reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.\n\nMany of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in\nPerl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.\n\nFor a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS\nfile in the Perl source distribution.\n", "subsections": [ { "name": "Reporting Bugs", "content": "If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the\ncomp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at https://rt.perl.org/ . There may\nalso be information at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.\n\nIf you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your\nrelease. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report,\nalong with the output of \"perl -V\", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by\nthe Perl porting team.\n\nIf the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it inappropriate to send\nto a publicly archived mailing list, then please send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org.\nThis points to a closed subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core\ncommitters, who will be able to help assess the impact of issues, figure out a resolution,\nand help co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate or fix the problem across all\nplatforms on which Perl is supported. Please only use this address for security issues in\nthe Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.\n" } ] }, "SEE ALSO": { "content": "The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on what changed.\n\nThe INSTALL file for how to build Perl.\n\nThe README file for general stuff.\n\nThe Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.\n\n\n\nperl v5.34.0 2025-07-25 PERL5202DELTA(1)", "subsections": [] } } } }