Changes/perl5.34

Perl 5.34

Summary

A new perl 5.34 version brings a lot of changes done over a year of development. Perl 5.34 will be released in May 20th 2021. See 5.34.0-RC1 perldelta for more details about new release.

Owner

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

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora Linux 35
• Last updated: 2021-05-07
• FESCo issue: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Items to Be Done

• Get dedicated build-root from rel-engs (f35-perl)
• Upstream to release Perl 5.34
• Define perl_bootstrap in perl-srpm-macros
• Rebase perl to 5.34.0
• 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
• 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 f35 build root
• Rebuild Perl packages: 0 of 3247 done (0.00%)

Detailed Description

New perl is released every year and updates containing mainly bug fixes follow during the year. The 5.34.0 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 f35-perl build-root against perl 5.34.0 and then if no major problem emerges the packages will be merged back to f35 build-root.

• Proposal owners:

New perl and all packages requiring perl or a Perl module will be rebuilt into f35-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: #10106

Release engineers will be asked for new f35-perl build-root inheriting from f35 build-root. After successful finishing the rebuild, they will be asked to merge f35-perl packages back to f35 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 5.32 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.

mod_perl is not possible build with Perl 5.34. We are not able to solve it easily now. We will try to update packages to reduce the list of broken mod_perl dependencies.

How To Test

Try upgrading from Fedora 34 to 35. 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

If we find perl 5.34 is not suitable for Fedora 35, we will revert back to perl 5.32 and we drop the temporary build-root with already rebuilt packages.

• Contingency deadline: branching Fedora 35 from Rawhide.
• Blocks release? No.

Documentation

• 5.34.0 perldelta
• An announcement on the perl-devel mailing list
• An announcement on fedora-devel mailing list

Release Notes

• Experimental try/catch syntax was added
• qr/{,n}/ is now accepted
• Blanks freely allowed within but adjacent to curly braces
• New octal syntax 0oddddd
• Lots of modules were updated
• Documentation was updated and some new pages were added
  • perldocstyle - this document is a guide for the authorship and maintenance of the documentation that ships with Perl
  • perlgov - this document describes the goals, scope, system, and rules for Perl's new governance model.
• -Dusedefaultstrict - EXPERIMENTAL: Perl can now be built with strict on by default (using this configuration option)