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perl5142delta - what is new for perl v5.14.2

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.14.1 release and the 5.14.2 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.14.0, first read perl5141delta,
which describes differences between 5.14.0 and 5.14.1.

Core Enhancements

No changes since 5.14.0.

Security

"File::Glob::bsd_glob()" memory error with GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC (CVE-2011-2728).
Calling "File::Glob::bsd_glob" with the unsupported flag GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC would cause an
access violation / segfault. A Perl program that accepts a flags value from an external
source could expose itself to denial of service or arbitrary code execution attacks.
There are no known exploits in the wild. The problem has been corrected by explicitly
disabling all unsupported flags and setting unused function pointers to null. Bug
reported by Clement Lecigne.

"Encode" decode_xs n-byte heap-overflow (CVE-2011-2939)
A bug in "Encode" could, on certain inputs, cause the heap to overflow. This problem has
been corrected. Bug reported by Robert Zacek.

Incompatible Changes

There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.14.0. If any exist, they are bugs
and reports are welcome.

Deprecations

There have been no deprecations since 5.14.0.

Modules and Pragmata

New Modules and Pragmata
None

Updated Modules and Pragmata
· CPAN has been upgraded from version 1.9600 to version 1.9600_01.

CPAN::Distribution has been upgraded from version 1.9602 to 1.9602_01.

Backported bugfixes from CPAN version 1.9800. Ensures proper detection of
"configure_requires" prerequisites from CPAN Meta files in the case where
"dynamic_config" is true. [rt.cpan.org #68835]

Also ensures that "configure_requires" is only checked in META files, not MYMETA
files, so protect against MYMETA generation that drops "configure_requires".

· Encode has been upgraded from version 2.42 to 2.42_01.

See "Security".

· File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.12 to version 1.13.

See "Security".

· PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from version 0.11 to 0.11_01.

It fixes a problem with "open my $fh, ">", \$scalar" not working if $scalar is a copy-
on-write scalar.

Removed Modules and Pragmata
None

Platform Support

New Platforms
None

Discontinued Platforms
None

Platform-Specific Notes
HP-UX PA-RISC/64 now supports gcc-4.x
A fix to correct the socketsize now makes the test suite pass on HP-UX PA-RISC for
64bitall builds.

Building on OS X 10.7 Lion and Xcode 4 works again
The build system has been updated to work with the build tools under Mac OS X 10.7.

Bug Fixes

· In @INC filters (subroutines returned by subroutines in @INC), $_ used to misbehave:
If returned from a subroutine, it would not be copied, but the variable itself would
be returned; and freeing $_ (e.g., with "undef *_") would cause perl to crash. This
has been fixed [perl #91880].

· Perl 5.10.0 introduced some faulty logic that made "U*" in the middle of a pack
template equivalent to "U0" if the input string was empty. This has been fixed [perl
#90160].

· "caller" no longer leaks memory when called from the DB package if @DB::args was
assigned to after the first call to "caller". Carp was triggering this bug [perl
#97010].

· "utf8::decode" had a nasty bug that would modify copy-on-write scalars' string buffers
in place (i.e., skipping the copy). This could result in hashes having two elements
with the same key [perl #91834].

· Localising a tied variable used to make it read-only if it contained a copy-on-write
string.

· Elements of restricted hashes (see the fields pragma) containing copy-on-write values
couldn't be deleted, nor could such hashes be cleared ("%hash = ()").

· Locking a hash element that is a glob copy no longer causes subsequent assignment to
it to corrupt the glob.

· A panic involving the combination of the regular expression modifiers "/aa" introduced
in 5.14.0 and the "\b" escape sequence has been fixed [perl #95964].

Known Problems

This is a list of some significant unfixed bugs, which are regressions from 5.12.0.

· "PERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT" is broken.

Since perl 5.14.0, building with "-DPERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT" hasn't been possible. This
means that perl currently doesn't work on any platforms that require it to be built
this way, including Symbian.

While "PERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT" now works again on recent development versions of perl, it
actually working on Symbian again hasn't been verified.

We'd be very interested in hearing from anyone working with Perl on Symbian.

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.14.2 represents approximately three months of development since Perl 5.14.1 and
contains approximately 1200 lines of changes across 61 files from 9 authors.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users
and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that
became Perl 5.14.2:

Craig A. Berry, David Golden, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, H.Merijn Brand, Karl
Williamson, Nicholas Clark, Pau Amma and Ricardo Signes.

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 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 [email protected] 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
[email protected]. 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.

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