SID-02327: Perl 5.30

Status:	Answered	TWiki version:	6.1.0	Perl version:	5.30.0 (via Perlbrew)
Category:		Server OS:	Linux Kernel 2.6.32-754.29.2.el6.x86_64	Last update:	5 years ago

Has anyone run into any issues running TWiki 6.0.2 with Perl 5.26? Or, in other words, what versions of Perl above 5.8.8 have been successful?

Thanks.

-- Bob Mellinger - 2017-08-07

Discussion and Answer

I have not yet tried Perl 5.26 - my focus was on 5.24 because this version came with Debian Stretch, the current "stable" version. Is there any distribution which already provides 5.26 or would one have to compile it by themselves?

As for Perl 5.24: With TWiki 6.0.2, there'll be quite a bunch of warnings in the web server's error log, maybe a few plugins won't compile. The current SVN head (i.e. the sources to be used in the upcoming release) works quite fine with Perl 5.24. If you run into problems, please report them here or at the Bugs installation!

-- Harald Jörg - 2017-08-07

Thanks, Harald. We're going to do some additional "in-depth" testing of Perl 5.26 later this year. Will report our findings as they become available.

-- Bob Mellinger - 2017-08-09

As a new data point, running the test suite under Perl 5.26 with perlbrew under Debian Stretch has shown a few more harmless warnings (which will also be fixed in the next release) but no serious problems. From what I've read these warnings will become fatal in Perl 5.30, so we've still got some time until people need to upgrade to the next TWiki release.

-- Harald Jörg - 2017-09-04

FWIW, twiki 6.0.2 does not work with Fedora 27's perl 5.26.1 as it requires { to be escaped in regexes.

-- TWiki Guest - 2018-01-29

Ok, so now we do have a distribution with Perl 5.26.1, many thanks for that information!

...and it breaks. I was not aware that Perl 5.26.1 behaves differently from Perl 5.24, where the unescaped { just causes warnings. I filed a bug Bugs:Item7835 for that and marked it urgent.

The good news is that we've already fixed this issue in SVN (Bugs:Item7797), so all it needs is a new release based on the current trunk.

-- Harald Jörg - 2018-02-02

I know it's been a year since operating environments, like Perl 5.28 and TWiki 6.1 have been discussed. Is anyone aware of any issues with running TWiki 6.1 using Perl 5.28 or 5.29?

-- Bob Mellinger - 2019-04-26

I'm not aware of any issues with TWiki 6.1 and current versions of Perl. The test suite passes up to 5.29.10. I guess we're good to go for 5.30, which will come out soon!

-- Harald Jörg - 2019-05-01

Related to Harald's bug is an issue with the Wysiwyg editor. I was able to fix it by modifying a couple of unescaped left braces in the plugin's Handlers.pm file. Support.SID-02397

-- TWiki Guest - 2019-05-01

Many thanks! These cases of variables which at some point get interpolated into regular expressions are very difficult to catch. A Perl syntax check doesn't detect them, and the unit tests apparently don't run through that part. I'll submit a fix and hopefully get the plugin built.

-- Harald Jörg - 2019-05-01

Perl 5.30.0 UPDATE: We've been testing TWiki 6.10 using Perl 5.30.0 and have only run into the few warnings listed here.

---

[Wed Aug 28 13:50:41 2019] view: Unescaped left brace in regex is passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%STARTEXTRACT{ <-- HERE (?!.*%STARTEXTRACT)(.*?)}%(.*?)%STOPEXTRACT%/ at .../lib/TWiki/Plugins/FilterPlugin.pm line 53.

[Wed Aug 28 13:50:41 2019] view: Unescaped left brace in regex is passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%STARTSUBST{ <-- HERE (?!.*%STARTSUBST)(.*?)}%(.*?)%STOPSUBST%/ at .../lib/TWiki/Plugins/FilterPlugin.pm line 50.

[Wed Aug 28 13:50:41 2019] login: Unescaped left brace in regex is passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%STARTEXTRACT{ <-- HERE (?!.*%STARTEXTRACT)(.*?)}%(.*?)%STOPEXTRACT%/ at .../lib/TWiki/Plugins/FilterPlugin.pm line 53.

[Wed Aug 28 13:50:41 2019] login: Unescaped left brace in regex is passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%STARTSUBST{ <-- HERE (?!.*%STARTSUBST)(.*?)}%(.*?)%STOPSUBST%/ at .../lib/TWiki/Plugins/FilterPlugin.pm line 50.

---

Escaping the left brace \{ on lines 50 & 53 in FilterPlugin.pm has made these warnings go away. Testing to continue.

-- Bob Mellinger - 2019-08-28

UPDATE (11-JUN-2020): We've been running - TWiki-6.1.0, build 30610 - using Perlbrew with perl-5.30.0 for over a year. Other than a couple of issues posted above, all is working very well. Actually, the number of warnings/errors in the site's error logs has dropped significantly.

My sincerest thanks to all who have (and continue to) contribute to TWiki.

-- Bob Mellinger - 2020-06-11

You are very welcome, on behalf of the TWikiCommunity!

-- Peter Thoeny - 2020-06-15

      Change status to: Asked question Answered question Closed unanswered