Perl 5.40
Summary
A new perl 5.40 version brings a lot of changes done over a year of development. Perl 5.40 should be released on May 30th 2024. See perldelta for 5.40.0-RC1 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 41
- Last updated: 2024-05-28
- Announced
- Discussion thread
- FESCo issue: #3210
- Tracker bug: #2282166
- Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
Completed Items
Items in Progress
- Get dedicated build-root from rel-engs f41-perl
Items to Be Done
- Upstream to release Perl 5.40
- Define perl_bootstrap in perl-srpm-macros
- Rebase perl to 5.40.0
- Rebuild all dual-lived packages (84) - 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 packages requiring libperl.so or versioned perl(:MODULE_COMPAT): Use Fedora::Rebuild dependency solver
- Undefine perl_bootstrap
- Rebuild packages having perl_bootstrap condition in spec file (51 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 f41 build root
- Rebuild Perl packages: 0 of 599 done (0.00 %)
- Failed packages (0):
Detailed Description
New perl is released every year and updates containing mainly bug fixes follow during the year. The 5.40.0 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 f41-perl build-root against perl 5.40.0 and then if no major problem emerges the packages will be merged back to f41 build-root.
- Proposal owners: New perl and all packages requiring libperl.so or versioned perl(MODULE_COMPAT) will be rebuilt into f41-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: #12119
Release engineers will be asked for new f41-perl build-root inheriting from f41 build-root. After successful finishing the rebuild, they will be asked to merge f41-perl packages back to f41 build-root.
- Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)
- Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)
- Alignment with Community Initiatives:
Upgrade/compatibility impact
Vast majority of functionality will be preserved. Only the packages that failed to build against perl 5.40 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 40 to 41. 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 3500 packages depending on perl. We will rebuild only all dual-lived packages and packages which require libperl.so or versioned perl(MODULE_COMPAT). It means only about 600 packages needs to rebuild. Most of them are expected not to break. Finishing this change can be endangered only by critical changes in a toolchain. noarch packages don't need to be rebuilt now.
Contingency Plan
- Contingency mechanism: If we find perl 5.40 is not suitable for Fedora 41, we will revert back to perl 5.38 and we drop the temporary build-root with already rebuilt packages.
- Contingency deadline: branching Fedora 41 from Rawhide.
- Blocks release? No.
Documentation
- 5.40.0 perldelta
- An announcement on perl-devel mailing list
- An announcement on fedora-devel mailing list
Release Notes
TBD, when release candidate appears.