PERL5124DELTA(1perl)

📦
version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 perl5124delta — what's new for perl v5.12.4 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this is the perl5124delta page from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide and it's literally the tea on what changed in v5.12.4. it's short, it's sweet, it's giving "small but mighty patch release" energy. 🎀

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so this doc spills the differences between the 5.12.3 release and the 5.12.4 release. that's it, that's the whole premise.

if you're jumping up from something earlier like 5.12.2, babes, do yourself a favor and read perl5123delta first — it covers the glow-up from 5.12.2 to 5.12.3. and if you wanna know about the major changes, those all live in perl5120delta for the 5.12.0 era. 😌

🚫 Incompatible Changes 🚫

there are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.12.3. none. zero. nada.

if you find any, that's not a feature, that's a bug, and the maintainers would genuinely love a report. 🫶

🔧 Selected Bug Fixes 🔧

  • when strict "refs" mode is off, %{...} in rvalue context returns undef if its argument is undefined. but listen — an optimisation that dropped back in Perl 5.12.0 to make keys %{...} faster when used as a boolean did not take that into account. the result? keys %{+undef} (and keys %$foo when $foo is undefined) was throwing an error, when it should only be an error in strict mode. fixed now, bestie. [perl #81750]
  • lc, uc, lcfirst, and ucfirst no longer return untainted strings when the argument is tainted. this one's been broken since perl 5.8.9, so yeah, it was eating good for a while. [perl #87336]
  • fixed a case where it was possible that a freed buffer may have been read from when parsing a here document. 💀 spooky. it's handled.

📦 Modules and Pragmata 📦

  • Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 2.43 to 2.50. ✨

🧪 Testing 🧪

the cpan/CGI/t/http.t test script has been fixed to work when the environment has HTTPS_* environment variables, such as HTTPS_PROXY. so if your CI was acting up because of a proxy, that's why, and it's chill now. 😭

📖 Documentation 📖

updated the documentation for rand in perlfunc to note that it is not cryptographically secure. like, bestie, do not build your secrets on rand. noted in the docs now. 🔥

🌍 Platform Specific Notes 🌍

🐧 Linux 🐧

  • Support Ubuntu 11.04's new multi-arch library layout. iconic of Ubuntu to change things up. 💅

🫶 Acknowledgements 🫶

Perl 5.12.4 represents approximately 5 months of development since Perl 5.12.3 and contains approximately 200 lines of changes across 11 files from 8 authors. small release, big hearts. 👑

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. 🦋 and the following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.12.4:

Andy Dougherty, David Golden, David Leadbeater, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Jesse Vincent, Leon Brocard, Zsbán Ambrus.

🐛 Reporting Bugs 🐛

if you find something you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/. there may also be information at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page. go have a lil look before you panic. 🙈

if you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your release. and be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case — nobody wants your entire codebase, bestie, just the juicy part. 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're reporting has security implications, which make it inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org instead. this points to a closed subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core committers, who will be able to help assess the impact of issues, figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is supported. please only use this address for security issues in the Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN. fr fr, respect the channel. 🔒

👀 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.

okay that's the whole page, you're all caught up, go forth and upgrade responsibly. 💖

this was perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, and it lives in the PERL5124DELTA(1perl) manpage — mwah, bye bestie! 🎀✨🌸

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