PSC #220 2026-04-13

All three of us attended this long meeting consisting entirely of
dealing with release blockers.

- We found no blockers among the issues and patches new since last week.

- We weighed up [#23676][] again and decided that it merits blocker status even
  though the breakage was the result of a C compiler change, not of a change to
  perl (in this dev cycle or otherwise).

- We then reviewed all of the blockers we were already tracking and made
  decisions on how to proceed with all of them. Of particular note,

- We agreed that [#23131][] simply cannot be pursued in this form – not just in
  this cycle but at all. We may eventually be able to virtualize the stash
  entirely, allowing much deeper optimization by using a more rational internal
  data structure while maintaing the Perl-land illusion that nothing has
  changed (effectively turning the stash hash tree into an API in the same way
  that a tied hash is an API that looks like a data structure). But until such
  time, Perl-visible changes to the stash data structure are simply too
  disruptive.

- [#24340] is part of a series that constitutes a promising-looking fix which
  we want to pursue, but it didn’t get fully stabilized soon enough in this
  cycle, and because it’s in a dark and tricky corner of the codebase, we don’t
  want to take the risk of shipping with undiscovered new breakage there rather
  than a longstanding bug. Reapplying this patch series early in the next cycle
  should give it ample time to bake and settle down, and we hope it will
  eventually ship successfully.

- We spent some time debating [#24341][], tracing commit and issue tracker
  history to try to assess the correctness of the changes. We lean toward the
  view that this is breakage that core should fix, but discussion in the
  comments is ongoing.

[#23676]: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/23676 "#23676 BBC: Blead Breaks IO::ExplicitHandle"
[#23131]: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/23131 "#23131 Consider re-enabling coderef-in-stash optimization"
[#24340]: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/24340 "#24340 BBC: Blead Breaks App::CPAN::Mini::Visit"
[#24341]: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/24341 "#24341 BBC: Blead Breaks Clone::AsUTF8Bytes"

https://blogs.perl.org/users/psc/2026/04/this-week-in-psc-220-2026-04-13.html