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Perl 5.40

Summary

A new perl 5.40 version brings a lot of changes done over a year of development. Perl 5.40 was released on June 9th 2024. See perldelta for 5.40.0 for more details about new release.

Owner

Current status

Completed Items

  • Get dedicated build-root from rel-engs f41-perl
  • 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 (54 packages)
  • Rebuild packages requiring libperl.so or versioned perl(:MODULE_COMPAT): Use Fedora::Rebuild dependency solver
  • Rebuild all updated packages
  • Final lists of results
  • Merge dedicated build-root to rawhide and remove the dedicated one by rel-engs #12160
  • Synchronize packages upgraded in f41 build root

Items in Progress

  • Rebuild Perl packages: 595 of 601 done (99.00 %)
  • Failed packages (5):
    • genders - failure is not caused by Perl 5.40 BZ#2259159
    • libprelude - failure is not caused by Perl 5.40 BZ#2247193
    • slurm - failure is not caused by Perl 5.40 BZ#2266233
    • uwsgi - build fails with Python 3.13 BZ#2290556
    • znc
  • Unsatisfy dependencies (1):
    • perl-Authen-Krb5-Admin - missing perl(Authen::Krb5)

Items to Be Done

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 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

  • Core Enhancements
    • New __CLASS__ Keyword
    • :reader attribute for field variables
    • Permit a space in -M command-line option
    • Restrictions to use VERSION declarations
    • New builtin::inf and builtin::nan functions (experimental)
    • New ^^ logical xor operator
    • try/catch feature is no longer experimental
    • for iterating over multiple values at a time is no longer experimental
    • builtin module is no longer experimental
    • The :5.40 feature bundle adds try
    • use v5.40; imports builtin functions
  • Incompatible Changes
    • reset EXPR now calls set-magic on scalars
    • Calling the import method of an unknown package produces a warning
    • return no longer allows an indirect object
    • Class barewords no longer resolved as file handles in method calls under no feature "bareword_filehandles"
  • Deprecations
    • Using goto to jump from an outer scope into an inner scope is deprecated and will be removed completely in Perl 5.42.
  • Modules
    • Term::Table and Test2::Suite are new modules added to Perl Core
    • Lots of modules were updated
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