Revision as of 10:22, 13 December 2022

Perl 5.36

Summary

A new perl 5.36 version brings a lot of changes done over a year of development. Perl 5.36 will be released in May 28th 2022. See perldelta for more details about new release.

Owner

Name: Jitka Plesníková, Michal Josef Špaček
Email: <jplesnik@redhat.com>, <mspacek@redhat.com>

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora Linux 37
Last updated: 2022-12-13
devel list
FESCo issue: #2791
Tracker bug: #2088002
Release notes tracker: #840

Completed Items

Get dedicated build-root from rel-engs (f37-perl)
Upstream to release Perl 5.36
Define perl_bootstrap in perl-srpm-macros
Rebase perl to 5.36.0
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
Rebuild other packages: Use Fedora::Rebuild dependency solver
Undefine perl_bootstrap
Rebuild packages having perl_bootstrap condition in spec file (129 packages)
Rebuild all updated packages
Final lists of results
Merge dedicated build-root to rawhide and remove the dedicated one by rel-engs
Synchronize packages upgraded in f37 build root

Items in Progress

Rebuild Perl packages: 3261 of 3266 done (99.84 %)
Failed packages (5):
- amanda - BZ#2045195, the failure is not caused by Perl 5.36
- gplugin - BZ#2093218 - only ppc64le
- libsbml - BZ#2093197 - only i686
- thrift - BZ#2046213, the failure is not caused by Perl 5.36
- zypper - blocked by broken libzypp, the failure is not caused by Perl 5.36
Rebuild Fedora modules: 2 of 7 (28.57 %)
- nginx:mainline - DONE
- nginx:1.20
- postgresql:10
- postgresql:11
- postgresql:12
- postgresql:14
- subversion:1.14 - DONE

Items to Be Done

Detailed Description

New perl is released every year and updates containing mainly bug fixes follow during the year. The 5.36.0 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 f37-perl build-root against perl 5.36.0 and then if no major problem emerges the packages will be merged back to f37 build-root.

Proposal owners:

New perl and all packages requiring perl or a Perl module will be rebuilt into f37-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: #10771

Release engineers will be asked for new f37-perl build-root inheriting from f37 build-root. After successful finishing the rebuild, they will be asked to merge f37-perl packages back to f37 build-root.

Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Alignment with Objectives:

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Vast majority of functionality will be preserved. Only the packages that failed to build against perl 5.36 will be removed from the distribution. That will require to remove those packages from the existing systems otherwise a package manager will encounter unsatisfied dependencies. The developers in Perl language are advised to install perl-doc and perl-debugger packages.

How To Test

Try upgrading from Fedora 36 to 37. 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. With the exception that previously locally installed modules with a CPAN clients will need a reinstallation.

Dependencies

There is more than 3200 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

Contingency mechanism: If we find perl 5.36 is not suitable for Fedora 37, we will revert back to perl 5.34 and we drop the temporary build-root with already rebuilt packages.
Contingency deadline: branching Fedora 37 from Rawhide.
Blocks release? No.

Documentation

Release Notes

Core Enhancements
- a new commmand-line flag -g which it is alias for -0777
- Unicode 14.0 is supported
- regex sets are no longer considered experimental
- Variable length lookbehind is mostly no longer considered experimental
- SIGFPE no longer deferred
- iterating over multiple values at a time (experimental)
- new module builtin which provides documentation for new always-present functions that are built into the interpreter (experimental)
- adds support for defer blocks, which are blocks of code prefixed by the defer modifier (experimental)
- try/catch syntax has been extended to support an optional third block introduced by the finally keyword (experimental)
- non-ASCII delimiters for quote-like operators (experimental)
- @_ is now experimental within signatured subs
Incompatible Changes
- A physically empty sort is now a compile-time error
Deprecations
- use VERSION (where VERSION is below v5.11) after use v5.11 is deprecated
Lots of modules were updated
Changes in errors and warnings can cause failures in tests
Performance Enhancements
- Perl now probe for compiler support for C11 thread local storage, and where available use this for "implicit context" for XS extensions making API calls for a threaded Perl build. This requires fewer function calls at the C level than POSIX thread specific storage.

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