perldelta
(1)
Name
perldelta - what is new for perl v5.12.5
Synopsis
Please see following description for synopsis
Description
Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLDELTA(1)
NAME
perldelta - what is new for perl v5.12.5
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.12.4
release and the 5.12.5 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.12.3,
first read perl5124delta, which describes differences
between 5.12.3 and 5.12.4.
Security
"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.
"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.
Heap buffer overrun in 'x' string repeat operator
(CVE-2012-5195)
Poorly written perl code that allows an attacker to specify
the count to perl's 'x' string repeat operator can already
cause a memory exhaustion denial-of-service attack. A flaw
in versions of perl before 5.15.5 can escalate that into a
heap buffer overrun; coupled with versions of glibc before
2.16, it possibly allows the execution of arbitrary code.
This problem has been fixed.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.4.
If any exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.
Modules and Pragmata
Updated Modules
B::Concise
B::Concise no longer produces mangled output with the -tree
option [perl #80632].
charnames
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Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLDELTA(1)
A regression introduced in Perl 5.8.8 has been fixed, that
caused charnames::viacode(0) to return "undef" instead of
the string "NULL" [perl #72624].
Encode has been upgraded from version 2.39 to version
2.39_01.
See "Security".
File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.07 to version
1.07_01.
See "Security".
Unicode::UCD
The documentation for the "upper" function now actually says
"upper", not "lower".
Module::CoreList
Module::CoreList has been updated to version 2.50_02 to add
data for this release.
Changes to Existing Documentation
perlebcdic
The perlebcdic document contains a helpful table to use in
"tr///" to convert between EBCDIC and Latin1/ASCII.
Unfortunately, the table was the inverse of the one it
describes. This has been corrected.
perlunicode
The section on User-Defined Case Mappings had some bad
markup and unclear sentences, making parts of it unreadable.
This has been rectified.
perluniprops
This document has been corrected to take non-ASCII platforms
into account.
Installation and Configuration Improvements
Platform Specific Changes
Mac OS X
There have been configuration and test fixes to make
Perl build cleanly on Lion and Mountain Lion.
NetBSD
The NetBSD hints file was corrected to be compatible
with NetBSD 6.*
Selected Bug Fixes
o "chop" now correctly handles characters above
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Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLDELTA(1)
"\x{7fffffff}" [perl #73246].
o "($<,$>) = (...)" stopped working properly in 5.12.0.
It is supposed to make a single "setreuid()" call,
rather than calling "setruid()" and "seteuid()"
separately. Consequently it did not work properly.
This has been fixed [perl #75212].
o Fixed a regression of kill() when a match variable is
used for the process ID to kill [perl #75812].
o "UNIVERSAL::VERSION" no longer leaks memory. It started
leaking in Perl 5.10.0.
o The C-level "my_strftime" functions no longer leaks
memory. This fixes a memory leak in "POSIX::strftime"
[perl #73520].
o "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].
o Passing to "index" an offset beyond the end of the
string when the string is encoded internally in UTF8 no
longer causes panics [perl #75898].
o Syntax errors in "(?{...})" blocks in regular
expressions no longer cause panic messages [perl #2353].
o 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].
Errata
split() and @_
split() no longer modifies @_ when called in scalar or void
context. In void context it now produces a "Useless use of
split" warning. This is actually a change introduced in
perl 5.12.0, but it was missed from that release's
perl5120delta.
Acknowledgements
Perl 5.12.5 represents approximately 17 months of
development since Perl 5.12.4 and contains approximately
1,900 lines of changes across 64 files from 18 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 5.12.5:
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Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLDELTA(1)
Andy Dougherty, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry,
David Mitchell, Dominic Hargreaves, Father Chrysostomos,
Florian Ragwitz, George Greer, Goro Fuji, Jesse Vincent,
Karl Williamson, Leon Brocard, Nicholas Clark, Rafael
Garcia-Suarez, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Steve Hay, Tony
Cook.
The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is
automatically generated from version control history. In
particular, it does not include the names of the (very much
appreciated) contributors who reported issues to the Perl
bug tracker.
Many of the changes included in this version originated in
the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to
the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.
For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical
contributors, please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source
distribution.
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.
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following
attributes:
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+---------------+------------------+
|ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+---------------+------------------+
|Availability | runtime/perl-512 |
+---------------+------------------+
|Stability | Uncommitted |
+---------------+------------------+
SEE ALSO
The Changes file for an explanation of how to view
exhaustive details on what changed.
The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
The README file for general stuff.
The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
NOTES
This software was built from source available at
https://java.net/projects/solaris-userland. The original
community source was downloaded from
http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.12.5.tar.bz2
Further information about this software can be found on the
open source community website at http://www.perl.org/.
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