Title: Perl 5.34 upgrade now stable
Author: Sam James <sam@gentoo.org>
Posted: 2021-07-20
Revision: 1
News-Item-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/