Features/perl5.14

Perl 5.14

Summary

Perl 5.14 brings a lot of changes. Details about them could be found at perl [delta]

Owner

• Name: Marcela Mašláňová
• email: <mmaslano@redhat.com>

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 16
• Last updated: 2011-07-26
• Percentage of completion: 99 %
• Development Status: Green

Completed items

• Interpreter perl 5.14.1 rebuilt!
• Merge build root
• Migrate dependency filters from RPM 4.8 to 4.9: 99 of 99 done (100 %)
• Remove perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.12.*) Provides from interpreter package

Items in progress

• Perl packages are being rebuilt: 1864 of 1873 done (99.52 %)

Items still to be done

• perl-CGI-Application-Structured-Tools – built (perl-CGI-Application-Structured-Tools-0.013-4.fc16), to push to updates
• perl-MongoDB – upstream bug RT#68652
• perl-NOCpulse-Debug – bug 716369
• perl-NOCpulse-Gritch – bug 716369
• perl-NOCpulse-Object – bug 716369
• perl-Perlbal-XS-HTTPHeaders – in updates (perl-Perlbal-XS-HTTPHeaders-0.20-6.fc16)
• perl-Pugs-Compiler-Rule – bug 611015, dead package probably
• perl-threads-tbb – in updates (perl-threads-tbb-0.04-4.fc16)

Detailed Description

Perl releases will be now every year and updates during year will be containing mainly bug fixes. The release 5.14.0 should be stable release, but 5.14.1 should contain bugfixes for issues introduced in 5.14.0.

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora as bleeding edge distribution should be shipping new release of perl as one of the first distributions.

Scope

Everything will be rebuilt in testing buildroot dist-f16-perltest. 'fedpkg build --target dist-f16-perltest'

• update perl to 5.14.1
• update/fix/rebuild all perl modules
• rebuild all other dependent packages -> file bugs to maintainers
• in case no basic component is broken, then the packages could be tagged into dist-f16 buildroot

How To Test

Download packages from koji's buildroot dist-f16-perltest or try your packages with rebuild build requirements related to perl.

User Experience

Users could creatively use syntax: 'given' or smart matching '~~'.

Dependencies

repoquery --whatrequires --alldeps 'perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.1?.?)' | sort -u

Contingency Plan

In case some essential packages couldn't be fixed, then would be used perl-5.12.3.

Some packages seem to be unfixable, therefore they should be removed if they don't have any other dependencies.

Documentation

• changes between 5.12.3 and 5.14.x http://perldoc.perl.org/perldelta.html
• packaging guidelines http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Perl
• how to update modules and dual-lived modules: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Perl/updates
• new macros from rpm with different filter http://rpm.org/wiki/PackagerDocs/DependencyGenerator
• external generator of dependencies (outside of rpm) perl.{prov,req}

Release Notes

Notable changes in Perl 5.14 include:

* Unicode 6.0 support, along with many, many improvements to our Unicode-related features
* Improved support for IPv6
* Significantly easier autoconfiguration of the CPAN client
* A new /r flag which makes s/// substitutions non-destructive
* New regular expression flags to control whether matched strings should be treated as ASCII or Unicode
* New "package Foo { }" syntax
* Uses less memory and CPU than previous releases
* A swathe of bug fixes, a large number associated with the work of Dave Mitchell (http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/05/fixing-perl5-core-bugs-report-11.html) who has been fixing some deep bugs thanks to a TPF grant;

Perl 5.14.x features numerous new features, optimizations and bugfixes. You can find a complete list of these changes on the web at:

http://perldoc.perl.org/perldelta.html

Original release note:

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/perl5.14