G-User email draft

gistfile1.txt

Title: Perl 5.26 Unmasking Warning [affects all users]
To:  gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org, gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org

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: @INC removal related failures[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: The default of internal OP OP_SIBLING/OP_PARENT changing:
 - error: ... has no member named ‘op_sibling'
 
3: Unescaped "{" in regex becomming a fatal error:
 - Unescaped left brace in regex is illegal in ...

4: 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] ).

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