PERL587DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL587DELTA(1)NAME
perldelta - what is new for perl v5.8.7
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.8.6
release and the 5.8.7 release.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.6.
Core Enhancements
Unicode Character Database 4.1.0
The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl
5.8 has been updated to 4.1.0 from 4.0.1. See
<http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.1.0/#NotableChanges>
for the notable changes.
suidperl less insecure
A pair of exploits in "suidperl" involving debugging code
have been closed.
For new projects the core perl team strongly recommends that
you use dedicated, single purpose security tools such as
"sudo" in preference to "suidperl".
Optional site customization script
The perl interpreter can be built to allow the use of a site
customization script. By default this is not enabled, to be
consistent with previous perl releases. To use this, add
"-Dusesitecustomize" to the command line flags when running
the "Configure" script. See also "-f" in perlrun.
"Config.pm" is now much smaller.
"Config.pm" is now about 3K rather than 32K, with the infre-
quently used code and %Config values loaded on demand. This
is transparent to the programmer, but means that most code
will save parsing and loading 29K of script (for example,
code that uses "File::Find").
Modules and Pragmata
+ B upgraded to version 1.09
+ base upgraded to version 2.07
+ bignum upgraded to version 0.17
+ bytes upgraded to version 1.02
perl v5.8.8 2006-06-30 1
PERL587DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL587DELTA(1)
+ Carp upgraded to version 1.04
+ CGI upgraded to version 3.10
+ Class::ISA upgraded to version 0.33
+ Data::Dumper upgraded to version 2.121_02
+ DB_File upgraded to version 1.811
+ Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.06
+ Digest upgraded to version 1.10
+ Encode upgraded to version 2.10
+ FileCache upgraded to version 1.05
+ File::Path upgraded to version 1.07
+ File::Temp upgraded to version 0.16
+ IO::File upgraded to version 1.11
+ IO::Socket upgraded to version 1.28
+ Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.77
+ Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.15
+ overload upgraded to version 1.03
+ PathTools upgraded to version 3.05
+ Pod::HTML upgraded to version 1.0503
+ Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.14
+ Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.58
+ Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.30
+ Symbol upgraded to version 1.06
+ Term::ANSIColor upgraded to version 1.09
+ Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.48
+ Test::Simple upgraded to version 0.54
+ Text::Wrap upgraded to version 2001.09293, to fix a bug
when wrap() was called with a non-space separator.
perl v5.8.8 2006-06-30 2
PERL587DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL587DELTA(1)
+ threads::shared upgraded to version 0.93
+ Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.66
+ Time::Local upgraded to version 1.11
+ Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.32
+ utf8 upgraded to version 1.05
+ Win32 upgraded to version 0.24, which provides
Win32::GetFileVersion
Utility Changes
find2perl enhancements
"find2perl" has new options "-iname", "-path" and "-ipath".
Performance Enhancements
The internal pointer mapping hash used during ithreads clon-
ing now uses an arena for memory allocation. In tests this
reduced ithreads cloning time by about 10%.
Installation and Configuration Improvements
+ The Win32 "dmake" makefile.mk has been updated to make
it compatible with the latest versions of dmake.
+ "PERL_MALLOC", "DEBUG_MSTATS", "PERL_HASH_SEED_EXPLICIT"
and "NO_HASH_SEED" should now work in Win32 makefiles.
Selected Bug Fixes
+ The socket() function on Win32 has been fixed so that it
is able to use transport providers which specify a pro-
tocol of 0 (meaning any protocol is allowed) once more.
(This was broken in 5.8.6, and typically caused the use
of ICMP sockets to fail.)
+ Another obscure bug involving "substr" and UTF-8 caused
by bad internal offset caching has been identified and
fixed.
+ A bug involving the loading of UTF-8 tables by the
regexp engine has been fixed - code such as ""\x{100}"
=~ /[[:print:]]/" will no longer give corrupt results.
+ Case conversion operations such as "uc" on a long
Unicode string could exhaust memory. This has been
fixed.
+ "index"/"rindex" were buggy for some combinations of
Unicode and non-Unicode data. This has been fixed.
perl v5.8.8 2006-06-30 3
PERL587DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL587DELTA(1)
+ "read" (and presumably "sysread") would expose the UTF-8
internals when reading from a byte oriented file handle
into a UTF-8 scalar. This has been fixed.
+ Several "pack"/"unpack" bug fixes:
+ Checksums with "b" or "B" formats were broken.
+ "unpack" checksums could overflow with the "C" for-
mat.
+ "U0" and "C0" are now scoped to "()" "pack"
sub-templates.
+ Counted length prefixes now don't change "C0"/"U0"
mode.
+ "pack" "Z0" used to destroy the preceding character.
+ "P"/"p" "pack" formats used to only recognise
literal "undef"
+ Using closures with ithreads could cause perl to crash.
This was due to failure to correctly lock internal OP
structures, and has been fixed.
+ The return value of "close" now correctly reflects any
file errors that occur while flushing the handle's data,
instead of just giving failure if the actual underlying
file close operation failed.
+ "not() || 1" used to segfault. "not()" now behaves like
not(0), which was the pre 5.6.0 behaviour.
+ "h2ph" has various enhancements to cope with constructs
in header files that used to result in incorrect or
invalid output.
New or Changed Diagnostics
There is a new taint error, "%ENV is aliased to %s". This
error is thrown when taint checks are enabled and when *ENV
has been aliased, so that %ENV has no env-magic anymore and
hence the environment cannot be verified as taint-free.
The internals of "pack" and "unpack" have been updated. All
legitimate templates should work as before, but there may be
some changes in the error reported for complex failure
cases. Any behaviour changes for non-error cases are bugs,
and should be reported.
Changed Internals
There has been a fair amount of refactoring of the "C"
perl v5.8.8 2006-06-30 4
PERL587DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL587DELTA(1)
source code, partly to make it tidier and more maintainable.
The resulting object code and the "perl" binary may well be
smaller than 5.8.6, and hopefully faster in some cases, but
apart from this there should be no user-detectable changes.
"${^UTF8LOCALE}" has been added to give perl space access to
"PL_utf8locale".
The size of the arenas used to allocate SV heads and most SV
bodies can now be changed at compile time. The old size was
1008 bytes, the new default size is 4080 bytes.
Known Problems
Unicode strings returned from overloaded operators can be
buggy. This is a long standing bug reported since 5.8.6 was
released, but we do not yet have a suitable fix for it.
Platform Specific Problems
On UNICOS, lib/Math/BigInt/t/bigintc.t hangs burning CPU.
ext/B/t/bytecode.t and ext/Socket/t/socketpair.t both fail
tests. These are unlikely to be resolved, as our valiant
UNICOS porter's last Cray is being decommissioned.
Reporting Bugs
If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the
articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc news-
group and the perl bug database at http://bugs.perl.org.
There may also be information at http://www.perl.org, the
Perl Home Page.
If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the
perlbug program included with your release. Be sure to trim
your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug
report, along with the output of "perl -V", will be sent off
to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team.
You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at
http://bugs.perl.org/
SEE ALSO
The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.
The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
The README file for general stuff.
The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
perl v5.8.8 2006-06-30 5
