Perl 5.18
Summary
A new perl 5.18 version brings a lot of changes done over a year of development. See 5.18.0 perldelta for more details.
Owner
- Name: Petr Písař
- Email: <ppisar@redhat.com>
- Name: Jitka Plesníková
- Email: <jplesnik@redhat.com>
- Release notes owner:
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 20
- Last updated: 2013-06-04
- Tracker bug: will be assigned by the Wrangler
Detailed Description
New perl is released every year and updates containing mainly bug fixes follow during the year. The 5.18.0 version is stable release this year and 5.18.1 and subsequent revisions will follow during the year to fix issues introduced in 5.18.0.
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 f20-perl build-root against perl 5.18.0 and then if no major problem emerges the packages will be merged back to f20 build-root.
- Proposal owners:
New perl and all packages requiring perl or a Perl module will be rebuilt into f20-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:
Release engineers will be asked for new f20-perl build-root inheriting from f20 build-root. After successful finishing the rebuild, they will be asked to merge f20-perl packages back to f20 build-root.
- Policies and guidelines:
No policies have to be modified to complete this change.
Upgrade/compatibility impact
Vast majority of functionality will be preserved. Only the packages that failed to build against perl 5.18 will be removed from the distribution. That will require to remove those packages from existing systems otherwise package manager will encounter unsatisfied dependencies.
How To Test
Try upgrading from Fedora 19 to 20. Try some Perl application to verify they work as expected.
User Experience
There should not be any remarkable change in user experience. Though developers can hit some changes in perl interpreter behavior like a hash key randomization.
Dependencies
There is more than 2000 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
If we find perl 5.18 is not suitable for Fedora 20, we will revert back to perl 5.16 and we drop the temporary build-root with already rebuilt packages.
- Contingency deadline: branching Fedora 20 from Rawhide.
- Blocks release? No.
Documentation
Release Notes
To be done.