Changes/perl5.30

Perl 5.30

Summary

A new perl 5.30 version brings a lot of changes done over a year of development. Perl 5.30 should be released at the end of May 2019. See 5.30.0 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 31
• Last updated: 2019-05-14
• Tracker bug: []
• Release Notes tracking: []

Items to Be Done

• Upstream to release Perl 5.30
• Get dedicated build-root from rel-engs (f31-perl)
• Define perl_bootstrap in perl-srpm-macros
• Rebase perl to 5.30.0
• Build new perl 5.30 keeping old COMPAT Provides
• Rebuild dual-lived packages (otherwise dnf recommends --skip-broken and fails)
• Rebuild packages needed for minimal build-root
• Rebuild packages needed for building source packages from git repository
• Remove old perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.28.*) from perl
• Undefine perl_bootstrap
• Rebuild other packages: Use Fedora::Rebuild dependency solver
• 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 f31 build root
• Rebuilt Perl packages: 0 of 3186 done (0.00 %)
• Failed builds (0):
• Unsatisfied dependencies (0):

Detailed Description

New perl is released every year and updates containing mainly bug fixes follow during the year. The 5.30.0 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 f31-perl build-root against perl 5.30.0 and then if no major problem emerges the packages will be merged back to f31 build-root.

• Proposal owners:

New perl and all packages requiring perl or a Perl module will be rebuilt into f31-perl build-root.

• Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

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: [] (a check of an impact with Release Engineering is needed)

Release engineers will be asked for new f31-perl build-root inheriting from f31 build-root. After successful finishing the rebuild, they will be asked to merge f31-perl packages back to f31 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 5.30 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 30 to 31. 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 3100 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 5.30 is not suitable for Fedora 31, we will revert back to perl 5.28 and we drop the temporary build-root with already rebuilt packages.

• Contingency deadline: branching Fedora 31 from Rawhide.
• Blocks release? No.

Documentation

• 5.30.0 perldelta
• An announcement on the perl-devel mailing list

Release Notes

Important Changes

• Unicode 11, 12 and draft 12.1 is supported
• The upper limit "n" specifiable in a regular expression quantifier of the form "{m,n}" has been doubled to 65534
• Wildcards in Unicode property value specifications are now partially supported
• qr'\N{name}' is now supported
• It is now possible to compile perl to always use thread-safe locale operations.
• Limited variable length lookbehind in regular expression pattern matching is now experimentally supported
• Use faster method to convert to UTF-8
• Turkic UTF-8 locales are now seamlessly supported
• Eliminate opASSIGN macro usage from core
• -Drv now means something on -DDEBUGGING builds

Removed Features and Incompatible Changes

• Removed modules: Math::BigInt::CalcEmu, arybase, Locale::Code, B::Debug
• Pattern delimiters now must be graphemes
• Delimiters must now be graphemes
• Some formerly deprecated uses of an unescaped left brace "{" in regular expression patterns are now illegal
• Assigning non-zero to $[ is fatal
• Previously deprecated sysread()/syswrite() on :utf8 handles now fatal
• my() in false conditional prohibited
• Fatalize $* and $#
• Fatalize unqualified use of dump()
• Remove File::Glob::glob()
• pack() no longer can return malformed UTF-8
• Any set of digits in the Common script are legal in a script run of another script
• JSON::PP enable allow_nonref by default

Deprecated Features

• In XS code, use of various macros dealing with UTF-8.