[steve.m.hay at googlemail.com: Perl 5.20.2 is now available!]

[Dominic Hargreaves]

I had a look through the changelog and picked out these potential
regressions from 5.14 (ignoring platform specific issues on unsupported
platforms, and doc changes).

    *   In Perl 5.20.0, $^N accidentally had the internal UTF8 flag turned off
        if accessed from a code block within a regular expression, effectively
        UTF8-encoding the value. This has been fixed. [perl #123135]
        <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123135>

    *   Due to a mistake in the string-copying logic, copying the value of a
        state variable could instead steal the value and undefine the
        variable. This bug, introduced in Perl 5.20, would happen mostly for
        long strings (1250 chars or more), but could happen for any strings
        under builds with copy-on-write disabled. [perl #123029]
        <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123029>

    *   Fixed a bug that could cause perl to execute an infinite loop during
        compilation. [perl #122995]
        <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=122995>

    *   Tainted constants evaluated at compile time no longer cause unrelated
        statements to become tainted. [perl #122669]
        <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=122669>

    *   In Perl 5.20.0, "sort CORE::fake" where 'fake' is anything other than
        a keyword started chopping of the last 6 characters and treating the
        result as a sort sub name. The previous behaviour of treating
        "CORE::fake" as a sort sub name has been restored. [perl #123410]
        <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123410>

    *   A bug in regular expression patterns that could lead to segfaults and
        other crashes has been fixed. This occurred only in patterns compiled
        with "/i", while taking into account the current POSIX locale (this
        usually means they have to be compiled within the scope of "use
        locale"), and there must be a string of at least 128 consecutive bytes
        to match. [perl #123539]
        <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123539>

    *   "qr/@array(?{block})/" no longer dies with "Bizarre copy of ARRAY".
        [perl #123344] <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123344>

    *   A memory leak in some regular expressions, introduced in Perl 5.20.1,
        has been fixed. [perl #123198]
        <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123198>

    *   "formline("@...", "a");" would crash. The "FF_CHECKNL" case in
        pp_formline() didn't set the pointer used to mark the chop position,
        which led to the "FF_MORE" case crashing with a segmentation fault.
        This has been fixed. [perl #123538]
        <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123538> [perl #123622]
        <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123622>

    *   A possible buffer overrun and crash when parsing a literal pattern
        during regular expression compilation has been fixed. [perl #123604]
        <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123604>

There's still rather more than I'm comfortable applying at this stage
in the freeze individually; I think if we are going to apply any of this
it should be the whole of 5.20.2, and the release team aren'te going to
be keen on that either.

Thoughts?

Dominic.

----- Forwarded message from Steve Hay <steve.m.hay at googlemail.com> -----

Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2015 18:35:35 +0000
From: Steve Hay <steve.m.hay at googlemail.com>
To: "perl5-porters at perl.org" <perl5-porters at perl.org>
Cc: noc at metacpan.org
Subject: Perl 5.20.2 is now available!

    Everyone loves Magical Trevor,
    'Cos the tricks that he does are ever so clever;
    Look at him now, disappearin' the cow,
    Where is the cow hidden right now?

    Taking a bow, it's Magical Trevor,
    Everybody's seen that the trick is clever;
    Look at him there with his leathery, leathery whip!
    It's made of magic, and with a little flip--

    Yeah, yeah, yeah, the cow is back,
    Yeah, yeah, yeah, the cow is back;
    Back, back, back from his magical journey,
    Yeah!

    What did he see in the parallel dimension?
    He saw beans, lots of beans, lots of beans, lots of beans;
    Oh, beans, lots of beans, lots of beans, lots of beans,
    Yeah, yeah!

        -- Jonathan "Jonti" Picking, "Magical Trevor"

We are over the moon to announce version 20.2, the second maintenance
release of version 20 of Perl 5.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.20.2 from your favourite CPAN
mirror or find it at:

  https://metacpan.org/release/SHAY/perl-5.20.2/

SHA1 digests for this release are:

  07263da0703d97733a4d51bf77192039462d4a5a  perl-5.20.2.tar.gz
  63126c683b4c79c35008a47d56f7beae876c569f  perl-5.20.2.tar.bz2

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perldelta.pod" located
in the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web.

Perl 5.20.2 represents approximately 5 months of development since Perl
5.20.1 and contains approximately 6,300 lines of changes across 170
files from 34 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
were approximately 1,900 lines of changes to 80 .pm, .t, .c and .h
files.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant
community of users and developers.  The following people are known to
have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.20.2:

Aaron Crane, Abigail, Andreas Voegele, Andy Dougherty, Anthony Heading,
Aristotle Pagaltzis, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel
Dragan, Doug Bell, Ed J, Father Chrysostomos, Glenn D. Golden, H.Merijn
Brand, Hugo van der Sanden, James E Keenan, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Jim
Cromie, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, kmx, Matthew Horsfall, Max
Maischein, Peter Martini, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Ricardo Signes, Shlomi
Fish, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Müller, Steve Hay, Tadeusz Sośnierz, Tony
Cook, Yves Orton, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
generated from version control history.  In particular, it does not
include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN
modules included in Perl's core.  We're grateful to the entire CPAN
community for helping Perl to flourish.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,
please see the F<AUTHORS> file in the Perl source distribution.

The next major stable release of Perl 5, version 22.0, should appear in
May 2015, with version 23.0 released around the same time.

Steve Hay


----- End forwarded message -----