NAME

Lexical::SealRequireHints - prevent leakage of lexical hints

DESCRIPTION

This module works around two historical bugs in Perl's handling of the
"%^H" (lexical hints) variable.  One bug causes lexical state in one file
to leak into another that is "require"d/"use"d from it.  This bug, [perl
#68590], was present up to Perl 5.10, fixed in Perl 5.11.0.  The second
bug causes lexical state (normally a blank "%^H" once the first bug is
fixed) to leak outwards from "utf8.pm", if it is automatically loaded
during Unicode regular expression matching, into whatever source is
compiling at the time of the regexp match.  This bug, [perl #73174],
was present from Perl 5.8.7 up to Perl 5.11.5, fixed in Perl 5.12.0.

Both of these bugs seriously damage the usability of any module
relying on "%^H" for lexical scoping, on the affected Perl versions.
It is in practice essential for such modules to work around these bugs.
On versions of Perl that require such a workaround, this module globally
changes the behaviour of "require", including "use" and the implicit
"require" performed in Unicode regular expression matching, so that
it no longer exhibits these bugs.  This is the most convenient kind of
workaround, and is meant to be invoked by any module that makes use of
lexical state.

The workaround supplied by this module takes effect the first time its
"import" method is called.  Typically this will be done by means of
a "use" statement.  This should be done before putting anything into
"%^H" that would have a problem with leakage; usually it suffices to do
this when loading the module that supplies the mechanism to set up the
vulnerable lexical state.  Invoking this module multiple times, from
multiple lexical-related modules, is not a problem: the workaround is
only applied once, and applies to everything.

This module is implemented in XS, with a pure Perl backup version for
systems that can't handle XS modules.  The XS version has a better chance
of playing nicely with other modules that modify "require" handling.

INSTALLATION

	perl Build.PL
	./Build
	./Build test
	./Build install

AUTHOR

Andrew Main (Zefram) <zefram@fysh.org>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2009, 2010, 2011 Andrew Main (Zefram) <zefram@fysh.org>

LICENSE

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.