=head1 NAME perldelta - what is new for perl v5.11.1 =head1 DESCRIPTION This document describes differences between the 5.11.0 release and the 5.11.1 release. =head1 Incompatible Changes =over =item The boolkeys op moved to the group of hash ops. This breaks binary compatibility. =item C<\s> C<\w> and C<\d> once again have the semantics they had in Perl 5.8.x. =back =head1 Core Enhancements =head2 Add C syntax This patch adds support for setting the $VERSION of a namespace when the namespace is declared with 'package'. It eliminates the need for 'our $VERSION = ...' and similar constructs. E.g. package Foo::Bar 1.23; # $Foo::Bar::VERSION == 1.23 There are several advantages to this: * VERSION is parsed in *exactly* the same way as 'use NAME VERSION' * $VERSION is set at compile time * Eliminates '$VERSION = ...' and 'eval $VERSION' clutter * As it requires VERSION to be a numeric literal or v-string literal, it can be statically parsed by toolchain modules without 'eval' the way MM->parse_version does for '$VERSION = ...' * Alpha versions with underscores do not need to be quoted; static parsing will preserve the underscore, but during compilation, Perl will remove underscores as it does for all numeric literals During development of this, there was discussion on #corehackers and elsewhere that this should also allow other metadata to be set such as "status" (stable/alpha) or "author/authority". On reflection, those metadata are not very well defined yet and likely should never be encoded into Perl core parsing so they can be freely changed in the future. (They could perhaps be achieved via a comment on the same line as 'package NAME VERSION'.) Version numbers, however, already have a very specific definition and use defined in the core through 'use NAME VERSION'. This patch merely provides appropriate symmetry for setting $VERSION with the exact same parsing and semantics as 'use'. It does not break old code with only 'package NAME', but code that uses 'package NAME VERSION' will need to be restricted to perl 5.11.X. This is analogous to the change to open() from two-args to three-args. Users requiring the latest Perl will benefit, and perhaps N years from now it will become standard practice when Perl 5.12 is targeted the way that 5.6 is today. The patch does not prevent 'package NAME VERSION' from being used multiple times for the same package with different version numbers, but nothing prevents $VERSION from being modified arbitrarily at runtime, either, so I see no urgen reason to add limitations or warnings so long as Perl uses a global $VERSION variable for package version numbers. I am posting this patch to the p5p list for discussion and review. If there seems to be general assent (or lack of dissent), I will go ahead and commit the patch to blead. =head1 Modules and Pragmata =head2 Updated Modules =over 4 =item Upgrade to Test-Simple-0.94 =item Upgrade to Storable-2.21 =item Upgrade to Pod-Simple-3.08 =item Upgrade to Parse-CPAN-Meta-1.40 =item Upgrade to ExtUtils-Manifest-1.57 =item Upgrade to ExtUtils-CBuilder-0.260301 =item Upgrade to CGI.pm-3.48 =item Update CPANPLUS to CPAN version 0.89_02 =item Upgrade to threads::shared 1.32 =item Update ExtUtils::ParseXS to 2.21 =item Upgrade File::Path to 2.08 (and add taint.t test) =item Upgrade Module::CoreList to 2.20 =item Updated Object-Accessor to CPAN version 0.36 =back =head1 New Documentation =over 4 =item L extends the "Social contract about contributed modules" into the beginnings of a document on Perl porting policies. =back =head1 Changes to Existing Documentation =over =item Documentation for C<$1> in perlvar.pod clarified =back =head1 Performance Enhancements =over 4 =item C has been optimized to be faster than C =back =head1 Installation and Configuration Improvements XXX Changes to F, F, F, and analogous tools go here. =head2 Platform Specific Changes =over 4 =item Darwin (Mac OS X) =over 4 =item Skip testing the be_BY.CP1131 locale on Darwin 10 (Mac OS X 10.6), as it's still buggy. =item Correct infelicities in the regexp used to identify buggy locales on Darwin 8 and 9 (Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, respectively). =back =item DragonFly BSD =over 4 =item Fix thread library selection [perl #69686] =back =item Win32 =over 4 =item Initial support for mingw64 is now available =back =back =head1 Selected Bug Fixes =over 4 =item Perl now properly returns a syntax error instead of segfaulting if C, C or C is used without an argument =item C now fails properly if called without an argument and when no previous file was read C now returns C<-1>, and sets errno to C, thus restoring the 5.8.x behaviour =item overload no longer implicitly unsets fallback on repeated 'use overload' lines =item POSIX::strftime() can now handle Unicode characters in the format string. =item The Windows select() implementation now supports all empty Cs more correctly. =back =head1 New or Changed Diagnostics =over 4 =item The 'syntax' category was removed from 5 warnings that should only be in 'deprecated'. =item Three fatal pack/unpack error messages have been normalized to "panic: %s" =item "Unicode character is illegal" has been rephrased to be more accurate It now reads C and the perldiag documentation has been expanded a bit. =item Perl now defaults to issuing a warning if a deprecated language feature is used. To disable this feature in a given lexical scope, you should use C For information about which language features are deprecated and explanations of various deprecation warnings, please see L =back =head1 Testing =over 4 =item Significant cleanups to core tests to ensure that language and interpreter features are not used before they're tested. =item F automatically checks the well-formedness of POD found in all .pl, .pm and .pod files in the F, other than in dual-lifed modules which are primarily maintained outside the Perl core. =item F now tests that all files listed in MANIFEST are present. =back =head1 Known Problems =over 4 =item Untriaged test crashes on Windows 2000 Several porters have reported mysterious crashes when Perl's entire test suite is run after a build on certain Windows 2000 systems. When run by hand, the individual tests reportedly work fine. =item Known test failures on VMS Perl 5.11.1 fails a small set of core and CPAN tests as of this release. With luck, that'll be sorted out for 5.11.2 =back =head1 Errata =over =item The Perl 5.11.0 release notes incorrectly described 'delete local' =back =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 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, 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 file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on what changed. The F file for how to build Perl. The F file for general stuff. The F and F files for copyright information. =cut This is all changes through 6609e0408cfa30e0d5c739e4c818f8591c88c0bc