Perl 5.34 upgrade now stable

Posted: 2021-07-20 by Sam James | Revision: 1
Format:
2.0
The Perl project in Gentoo has begun stabilisation of Perl 5.34 [0] which is the latest stable version released upstream.

While the package manager usually handles this upgrade cleanly, there are some bugs [1][2][3] which affect Portage's dependency resolution that sometimes mean rebuilds occur in the wrong order - this is exacerbated by the packaging model used for Perl (but not its fault).

We therefore recommend the following procedure for users: 1. Sync your tree: # emerge --sync

2. Perform a full world upgrade, e.g.: # emerge -a -uvDU @world --keep-going=y

3. If any failures occur, please run perl-cleaner --all, then try again: # perl-cleaner --all

4. Perform a world upgrade again.

5. Once complete, depclean: # emerge -a --depclean

If the upgrade fails with conflicts, please try --backtrack=1000 or some other large number.

Rarely, it may be necessary to perform a one-off installation of a package, but usually `perl-cleaner` will resolve the issue. If an error message occurs after running perl-cleaner, try e.g. for a fictional package dev-perl/foo: # emerge -a --oneshot --verbose dev-perl/foo

If you have any issues, please consult the standard support channels [4] (such as our forums or IRC channels) and we will do our best to get your system working well again.

[0] https://bugs.gentoo.org/802639 [1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/592880 [2] https://bugs.gentoo.org/793992 [3] https://bugs.gentoo.org/199856 [4] https://www.gentoo.org/support/