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CONTENTS

NAME

perl5261delta - what is new for perl v5.26.1

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.26.0 release and the 5.26.1 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.24.0, first read perl5260delta, which describes differences between 5.24.0 and 5.26.0.

Security

[CVE-2017-12837] Heap buffer overflow in regular expression compiler

Compiling certain regular expression patterns with the case-insensitive modifier could cause a heap buffer overflow and crash perl. This has now been fixed. [perl #131582]

[CVE-2017-12883] Buffer over-read in regular expression parser

For certain types of syntax error in a regular expression pattern, the error message could either contain the contents of a random, possibly large, chunk of memory, or could crash perl. This has now been fixed. [perl #131598]

[CVE-2017-12814] $ENV{$key} stack buffer overflow on Windows

A possible stack buffer overflow in the %ENV code on Windows has been fixed by removing the buffer completely since it was superfluous anyway. [perl #131665]

Incompatible Changes

There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.26.0. If any exist, they are bugs, and we request that you submit a report. See "Reporting Bugs" below.

Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules and Pragmata

Platform Support

Platform-Specific Notes

FreeBSD
Windows
  • Support for compiling perl on Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 (containing Visual C++ 14.1) has been added.

  • Building XS modules with GCC 6 in a 64-bit build of Perl failed due to incorrect mapping of strtoll and strtoull. This has now been fixed. [perl #131726] [cpan #121683] [cpan #122353]

Selected Bug Fixes

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.26.1 represents approximately 4 months of development since Perl 5.26.0 and contains approximately 8,900 lines of changes across 85 files from 23 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 990 lines of changes to 38 .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 5.26.1:

Aaron Crane, Andy Dougherty, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, David Mitchell, E. Choroba, Eric Herman, Father Chrysostomos, Jacques Germishuys, James E Keenan, John SJ Anderson, Karl Williamson, Ken Brown, Lukas Mai, Matthew Horsfall, Ricardo Signes, Sawyer X, Steve Hay, Tony Cook, Yves Orton, Zefram.

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 AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

Reporting Bugs

If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the perl bug database at https://rt.perl.org/ . There may also be information at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output of perl -V, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team.

If the bug you are reporting has security implications which make it inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then see "SECURITY VULNERABILITY CONTACT INFORMATION" in perlsec for details of how to report the issue.

Give Thanks

If you wish to thank the Perl 5 Porters for the work we had done in Perl 5, you can do so by running the perlthanks program:

perlthanks

This will send an email to the Perl 5 Porters list with your show of thanks.

SEE ALSO

The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on what changed.

The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.

The README file for general stuff.

The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.