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Perl 5.44

Summary

A new Perl 5.44 version brings a lot of changes done over a year of development. Perl 5.44 was released on July 16 2026. See perldelta for 5.44.0 for more details about new release.

Owner

Current status

Completed Items

  • Get dedicated build-root from rel-engs f45-perl
  • Upstream to release Perl 5.44 - July 16 2026
  • Define perl_bootstrap in perl-srpm-macros

Items in Progress

  • Rebase perl to 5.44.0

Items to Be Done

  • Rebuild all dual-lived packages (82) - otherwise dnf recommends --skip-broken and fails
  • Rebuild packages needed for minimal build-root
  • Rebuild packages needed for building source packages from git repository
  • Rebuild packages requiring libperl.so or versioned perl(:MODULE_COMPAT): Use Fedora::Rebuild dependency solver
  • Undefine perl_bootstrap
  • Rebuild packages having perl_bootstrap condition in spec file (53 packages)
  • Rebuild all updated packages
  • Final lists of results
  • Synchronize packages upgraded in f45 build root
  • Merge dedicated build-root to rawhide and remove the dedicated one by rel-engs MERGE
  • Rebuild Perl packages: 0 of 601 done (0.00 %)
  • Failed packages (0):
  • Unsatisfy dependencies (0):

Detailed Description

New Perl is released every year and updates containing mainly bug fixes follow during the year. The 5.44.0 version is stable release this year.

Benefit to Fedora

Up-to-date and latest perl release will be delivered to Fedora users.

Scope

Every Perl package will be rebuilt in a dedicated f45-perl build-root against perl 5.44.0 and then if no major problem emerges the packages will be merged back to f45 build-root.

  • Proposal owners: New perl and all packages requiring libperl.so or versioned perl(MODULE_COMPAT) will be rebuilt into f45-perl build-root.
  • Other developers: Owners of packages that fail to rebuild, mainly perl-sig users, will be asked using Bugzilla to fix or remove their packages from the distribution.

Release engineers will be asked for new f45-perl build-root inheriting from f45 build-root. After successful finishing the rebuild, they will be asked to merge f45-perl packages back to f45 build-root.

  • Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)
  • Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)
  • Alignment with Community Initiatives:

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Vast majority of functionality will be preserved. Only the packages that failed to build against perl 5.44 will be removed from the distribution. That will require to remove those packages from the existing systems otherwise a package manager will encounter unsatisfied dependencies. The developers in Perl language are advised to install perl-doc and perl-debugger packages.

How To Test

Try upgrading from Fedora 44 to 45. Try some Perl application to verify they work as expected. Try embedded perl in slapd or snmpd.

User Experience

There should not be any remarkable change in user experience. With the exception that previously locally installed modules with a CPAN clients will need a reinstallation.

Dependencies

There is more than 3500 packages depending on perl. We will rebuild only all dual-lived packages and packages which require libperl.so or versioned perl(MODULE_COMPAT). It means only about 600 packages needs to rebuild. Most of them are expected not to break. Finishing this change can be endangered only by critical changes in a toolchain. noarch packages don't need to be rebuilt now.

Contingency Plan

  • Contingency mechanism: If we find perl 5.44 is not suitable for Fedora 45, we will revert back to perl 5.42 and we drop the temporary build-root with already rebuilt packages.
  • Contingency deadline: branching Fedora 45 from Rawhide.
  • Blocks release? No.

Documentation

  • perldelta for 5.43.10
  • An announcement on perl-devel mailing list
  • An announcement on fedora-devel mailing list

Release Notes

Perl 5.44.0 is a new stable release that focuses on improving performance, refining existing features, and adding new experimental capabilities.

Core Language Improvements:

Exception messages thrown by method signatures now correctly account for the implied $self invocant parameter. Additionally, the experimental subroutine signatures feature has been extended to support named parameters (passing parameters by name/value pairs), and multi-variable foreach loops can now be used together with aliased references (both features remain experimental).

Unicode 17.0 Support:

Perl 5.44.0 officially supports the Unicode 17.0 standard. Along with this update, Unicode rules are now fully enforced on identifiers and regular expression group names, explicitly forbidding about 160 characters that match \w but violate Unicode XID properties.

Security Fix:

Addresses CVE-2026-8376, fixing a buffer overflow vulnerability in Perl_study_chunk on 32-bit builds where substring buffer sizes were incorrectly checked in characters rather than bytes.

Regular Expression Enhancements:

Introduces the experimental use feature "enhanced_xx" which allows bracketed character classes under the /xx modifier to extend across multiple lines and contain comments. Conversely, literal vertical spaces or unescaped # characters in character classes under /xx are now deprecated.

System Seeding Improvements:

The internal PRNG now prefers the getentropy() system call on supporting platforms (Linux, BSD, MacOS) to fetch random bytes, falling back to /dev/urandom or internal state hashes only upon failure.

Performance Enhancements:

Simple integer addition, subtraction, and multiplication are now slightly faster given compiler support. Populating a hash from a list of key/value pairs with constant string operands known at compile time has also been optimized.

Incompatible Changes and Deprecations:

Using goto to jump into the body of a loop or another block construct from the outside is no longer permitted and now throws a fatal exception.

Lots of Module Updates

For more detailed information, refer to the official perldelta for 5.44.0 documentation.

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