We're finally at a point where we're nearing the unmasking[1] of Perl 5.26 and making it visible to ~arch users, and a "news item" on this matter will appear shortly.
Due to a collection of various problems faced in this version,
extensive amounts of work has been needed to simply deliver an ~arch
release that isn't incredibly visibly broken [1][2].
Subsequently, this will require a lot of care from end users who use
~arch versions of Perl, specifically as breakages manifest all over the
tree, in places you wouldn't expect ( for example: make, automake,
autoconf, gcc, and even some python packages have been broken by
changes in this release )
If you use Gentoo as a production server, this will be a good time to
set aside a seperate box for testing the side effects of this release
on your platform, and you should assume this release *will* affect you
in some way.
There are 4 Major types of failures [3]:
1: [build&runtime] failiures related to the removal of '.' from @INC [4] such
as:
- Can't locate inc:: ... in @INC (you may need to install the ... module)
- Can't locate t:: ... in @INC (you may need to install the ... module)
- do "foo.pl" failed, '.' is no longer in @INC; did you mean do "./foo.pl"?
2: [buildtime] The default of internal OP OP_SIBLING/OP_PARENT changing:
- error: ... has no member named ‘op_sibling'
3: [runtime] Unescaped "{" in regex becomming a fatal error:
- Unescaped left brace in regex is illegal in ...
4: [runtime] The removal of POSIX::tmpname in favour of File::Temp
- Unimplemented: POSIX::tmpnam()
Our hope is to have all the in-tree bugs [5] fixed long in advance of
needing to stabilize Perl 5.26.
However, special efforts will have to be added for anything using an
overlay, and any of your private code ( such as things you've manually
installed into /opt or /usr/local/ ) will need additional care as
these are outside the visibility of Gentoo Devs.
Please make sure to report any bugs you find that are clearly caused by
Perl 5.26 ( of course, first skim the lengthy list of known issues for
duplicates [6] ).
For any questions, please follow up in reply to this email, or ask
us on freenode.org#gentoo-perl
1: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=perl-5.26-unmask
2: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=612408
3: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Perl/5.26_Known_Issues
4: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Perl/Dot-In-INC-Removal
5: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=perl-5.26
6: https://bugs.gentoo.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=613764&hide_resolved=1
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