Changes/perl5.24

Perl 5.24

Summary

A new perl 5.24 version brings a lot of changes done over a year of development. Perl 5.24 will be released 5/9/2016. See 5.24.0 perldelta for more details about preparing release.

Owner

• Name: Jitka Plesníková
• Email: <jplesnik@redhat.com>
• Name: Petr Písař
• Email: <ppisar@redhat.com>
• Release notes owner:

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 25
• Last updated: 2016-05-09
• Tracker bug:

Completed items

• Get dedicated build-root from rel-engs (f25-perl)
• Define perl_bootstrap in perl-srpm-macros
• Rebase perl to 5.24.0
• Build new perl 5.24 keeping old COMPAT Provides

Items in progress

• Rebuild packages needed for minimal build-root
• Rebuild dual-lived packages (otherwise yum recommends --skip-broken and fails)

Items to be done

• Rebuild packages needed for building source packages from git repository
• Remove old perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.22.*) from perl
• Undefine perl_bootstrap
• Rebuild packages having perl_bootstrap condition in spec file
• Rebuild all updated packages
• Merge dedicated build-root to rawhide and remove the dedicated one by rel-engs
• Synchronize packages upgraded in f24 build root
• Rebuild other packages: Use Fedora::Rebuild dependency solver

Detailed Description

New perl is released every year and updates containing mainly bug fixes follow during the year. The 5.24.0 version is stable release this year.

Benefit to Fedora

Up-to-date and latest perl release will be delivered to Fedora users.

Scope

Every Perl package will be rebuilt in a dedicated f25-perl build-root against perl 5.24.0 and then if no major problem emerges the packages will be merged back to f25 build-root.

• Proposal owners:

New perl and all packages requiring perl or a Perl module will be rebuilt into f25-perl build-root.

• Other developers:

Owners of packages that fail to rebuild, mainly perl-sig users, will be asked using Bugzilla to fix or remove their packages from the distribution.

• Release engineering:

Release engineers will be asked for new f25-perl build-root inheriting from f25 build-root. After successful finishing the rebuild, they will be asked to merge f25-perl packages back to f25 build-root.

• Policies and guidelines:

No policies have to be modified to complete this change.

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Vast majority of functionality will be preserved. Only the packages that failed to build against perl 5.24 will be removed from the distribution. That will require to remove those packages from existing systems otherwise package manager will encounter unsatisfied dependencies.

How To Test

Try upgrading from Fedora 24 to 25. Try some Perl application to verify they work as expected. Try embedded perl in slapd or snmpd.

User Experience

There should not be any remarkable change in user experience.

Dependencies

There is more than 2700 packages depending on perl. Most of them are expected not to break. Finishing this change can be endangered only by critical changes in a toolchain.

Contingency Plan

If we find perl 5.24 is not suitable for Fedora 25, we will revert back to perl 5.22 and we drop the temporary build-root with already rebuilt packages.

• Contingency deadline: branching Fedora 25 from Rawhide.
• Blocks release? No.

Documentation

• 5.24.0 perldelta

Release Notes

• New features:

TBD

• Changes:

TBD

• Removed features:

TBD