PERL588DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL588DELTA(1)NAME
perldelta - what is new for perl v5.8.8
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.8.7
release and the 5.8.8 release.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.8.7.
If any exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.
Core Enhancements
+ "chdir", "chmod" and "chown" can now work on filehandles
as well as filenames, if the system supports respec-
tively "fchdir", "fchmod" and "fchown", thanks to a
patch provided by Gisle Aas.
Modules and Pragmata
+ "Attribute::Handlers" upgraded to version 0.78_02
+ Documentation typo fix
+ "attrs" upgraded to version 1.02
+ Internal cleanup only
+ "autouse" upgraded to version 1.05
+ Simplified implementation
+ "B" upgraded to version 1.09_01
+ The inheritance hierarchy of the "B::" modules has
been corrected; "B::NV" now inherits from "B::SV"
(instead of "B::IV").
+ "blib" upgraded to version 1.03
+ Documentation typo fix
+ "ByteLoader" upgraded to version 0.06
+ Internal cleanup
+ "CGI" upgraded to version 3.15
+ Extraneous "?" from "self_url()" removed
+ "scrolling_list()" select attribute fixed
+ "virtual_port" now works properly with the https
protocol
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+ "upload_hook()" and "append()" now works in
function-oriented mode
+ "POST_MAX" doesn't cause the client to hang any more
+ Automatic tab indexes are now disabled and new
"-tabindex" pragma has been added to turn automatic
indexes back on
+ "end_form()" doesn't emit empty (and non-validating)
"<div>"
+ "CGI::Carp" works better in certain mod_perl confi-
gurations
+ Setting $CGI::TMPDIRECTORY is now effective
+ Enhanced documentation
+ "charnames" upgraded to version 1.05
+ "viacode()" now accept hex strings and has been
optimized.
+ "CPAN" upgraded to version 1.76_02
+ 1 minor bug fix for Win32
+ "Cwd" upgraded to version 3.12
+ "canonpath()" on Win32 now collapses foo\.. sections
correctly.
+ Improved behaviour on Symbian OS.
+ Enhanced documentation and typo fixes
+ Internal cleanup
+ "Data::Dumper" upgraded to version 2.121_08
+ A problem where "Data::Dumper" would sometimes
update the iterator state of hashes has been fixed
+ Numeric labels now work
+ Internal cleanup
+ "DB" upgraded to version 1.01
+ A problem where the state of the regexp engine would
sometimes get clobbered when running under the
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debugger has been fixed.
+ "DB_File" upgraded to version 1.814
+ Adds support for Berkeley DB 4.4.
+ "Devel::DProf" upgraded to version 20050603.00
+ Internal cleanup
+ "Devel::Peek" upgraded to version 1.03
+ Internal cleanup
+ "Devel::PPPort" upgraded to version 3.06_01
+ "--compat-version" argument checking has been
improved
+ Files passed on the command line are filtered by
default
+ "--nofilter" option to override the filtering has
been added
+ Enhanced documentation
+ "diagnostics" upgraded to version 1.15
+ Documentation typo fix
+ "Digest" upgraded to version 1.14
+ The constructor now knows which module implements
SHA-224
+ Documentation tweaks and typo fixes
+ "Digest::MD5" upgraded to version 2.36
+ "XSLoader" is now used for faster loading
+ Enhanced documentation including MD5 weaknesses
discovered lately
+ "Dumpvalue" upgraded to version 1.12
+ Documentation fix
+ "DynaLoader" upgraded but unfortunately we're not able
to increment its version number :-(
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+ Implements "dl_unload_file" on Win32
+ Internal cleanup
+ "XSLoader" 0.06 incorporated; small optimisation for
calling "bootstrap_inherit()" and documentation
enhancements.
+ "Encode" upgraded to version 2.12
+ A coderef is now acceptable for "CHECK"!
+ 3 new characters added to the ISO-8859-7 encoding
+ New encoding "MIME-Header-ISO_2022_JP" added
+ Problem with partial characters and
"encoding(utf-8-strict)" fixed.
+ Documentation enhancements and typo fixes
+ "English" upgraded to version 1.02
+ the $COMPILING variable has been added
+ "ExtUtils::Constant" upgraded to version 0.17
+ Improved compatibility with older versions of perl
+ "ExtUtils::MakeMaker" upgraded to version 6.30 (was
6.17)
+ Too much to list here; see
<http://search.cpan.org/src/MSCHWERN/ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.30/Changes>
+ "File::Basename" upgraded to version 2.74, with changes
contributed by Michael Schwern.
+ Documentation clarified and errors corrected.
+ "basename" now strips trailing path separators
before processing the name.
+ "basename" now returns "/" for parameter "/", to
make "basename" consistent with the shell utility of
the same name.
+ The suffix is no longer stripped if it is identical
to the remaining characters in the name, again for
consistency with the shell utility.
+ Some internal code cleanup.
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+ "File::Copy" upgraded to version 2.09
+ Copying a file onto itself used to fail.
+ Moving a file between file systems now preserves the
access and modification time stamps
+ "File::Find" upgraded to version 1.10
+ Win32 portability fixes
+ Enhanced documentation
+ "File::Glob" upgraded to version 1.05
+ Internal cleanup
+ "File::Path" upgraded to version 1.08
+ "mkpath" now preserves "errno" when "mkdir" fails
+ "File::Spec" upgraded to version 3.12
+ "File::Spec-"rootdir()> now returns "\" on Win32,
instead of "/"
+ $^O could sometimes become tainted. This has been
fixed.
+ "canonpath" on Win32 now collapses "foo/.." (or
"foo\..") sections correctly, rather than doing the
"misguided" work it was previously doing. Note that
"canonpath" on Unix still does not collapse these
sections, as doing so would be incorrect.
+ Some documentation improvements
+ Some internal code cleanup
+ "FileCache" upgraded to version 1.06
+ POD formatting errors in the documentation fixed
+ "Filter::Simple" upgraded to version 0.82
+ "FindBin" upgraded to version 1.47
+ Now works better with directories where access
rights are more restrictive than usual.
+ "GDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.08
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+ Internal cleanup
+ "Getopt::Long" upgraded to version 2.35
+ "prefix_pattern" has now been complemented by a new
configuration option "long_prefix_pattern" that
allows the user to specify what prefix patterns
should have long option style semantics applied.
+ Options can now take multiple values at once (exper-
imental)
+ Various bug fixes
+ "if" upgraded to version 0.05
+ Give more meaningful error messages from "if" when
invoked with a condition in list context.
+ Restore backwards compatibility with earlier ver-
sions of perl
+ "IO" upgraded to version 1.22
+ Enhanced documentation
+ Internal cleanup
+ "IPC::Open2" upgraded to version 1.02
+ Enhanced documentation
+ "IPC::Open3" upgraded to version 1.02
+ Enhanced documentation
+ "List::Util" upgraded to version 1.18 (was 1.14)
+ Fix pure-perl version of "refaddr" to avoid blessing
an un-blessed reference
+ Use "XSLoader" for faster loading
+ Fixed various memory leaks
+ Internal cleanup and portability fixes
+ "Math::Complex" upgraded to version 1.35
+ "atan2(0, i)" now works, as do all the (computable)
complex argument cases
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+ Fixes for certain bugs in "make" and "emake"
+ Support returning the kth root directly
+ Support "[2,-3pi/8]" in "emake"
+ Support "inf" for "make"/"emake"
+ Document "make"/"emake" more visibly
+ "Math::Trig" upgraded to version 1.03
+ Add more great circle routines:
"great_circle_waypoint" and
"great_circle_destination"
+ "MIME::Base64" upgraded to version 3.07
+ Use "XSLoader" for faster loading
+ Enhanced documentation
+ Internal cleanup
+ "NDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.06
+ Enhanced documentation
+ "ODBM_File" upgraded to version 1.06
+ Documentation typo fixed
+ Internal cleanup
+ "Opcode" upgraded to version 1.06
+ Enhanced documentation
+ Internal cleanup
+ "open" upgraded to version 1.05
+ Enhanced documentation
+ "overload" upgraded to version 1.04
+ Enhanced documentation
+ "PerlIO" upgraded to version 1.04
+ "PerlIO::via" iterate over layers properly now
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+ "PerlIO::scalar" understands "$/ = """ now
+ "encoding(utf-8-strict)" with partial characters now
works
+ Enhanced documentation
+ Internal cleanup
+ "Pod::Functions" upgraded to version 1.03
+ Documentation typos fixed
+ "Pod::Html" upgraded to version 1.0504
+ HTML output will now correctly link to "=item"s on
the same page, and should be valid XHTML.
+ Variable names are recognized as intended
+ Documentation typos fixed
+ "Pod::Parser" upgraded to version 1.32
+ Allow files that start with "=head" on the first
line
+ Win32 portability fix
+ Exit status of "pod2usage" fixed
+ New "-noperldoc" switch for "pod2usage"
+ Arbitrary URL schemes now allowed
+ Documentation typos fixed
+ "POSIX" upgraded to version 1.09
+ Documentation typos fixed
+ Internal cleanup
+ "re" upgraded to version 0.05
+ Documentation typo fixed
+ "Safe" upgraded to version 2.12
+ Minor documentation enhancement
+ "SDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.05
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+ Documentation typo fixed
+ Internal cleanup
+ "Socket" upgraded to version 1.78
+ Internal cleanup
+ "Storable" upgraded to version 2.15
+ This includes the "STORABLE_attach" hook functional-
ity added by Adam Kennedy, and more frugal memory
requirements when storing under "ithreads", by using
the "ithreads" cloning tracking code.
+ "Switch" upgraded to version 2.10_01
+ Documentation typos fixed
+ "Sys::Syslog" upgraded to version 0.13
+ Now provides numeric macros and meaningful
"Exporter" tags.
+ No longer uses "Sys::Hostname" as it may provide
useless values in unconfigured network environments,
so instead uses "INADDR_LOOPBACK" directly.
+ "syslog()" now uses local timestamp.
+ "setlogmask()" now behaves like its C counterpart.
+ "setlogsock()" will now "croak()" as documented.
+ Improved error and warnings messages.
+ Improved documentation.
+ "Term::ANSIColor" upgraded to version 1.10
+ Fixes a bug in "colored" when $EACHLINE is set that
caused it to not color lines consisting solely of 0
(literal zero).
+ Improved tests.
+ "Term::ReadLine" upgraded to version 1.02
+ Documentation tweaks
+ "Test::Harness" upgraded to version 2.56 (was 2.48)
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+ The "Test::Harness" timer is now off by default.
+ Now shows elapsed time in milliseconds.
+ Various bug fixes
+ "Test::Simple" upgraded to version 0.62 (was 0.54)
+ "is_deeply()" no longer fails to work for many cases
+ Various minor bug fixes
+ Documentation enhancements
+ "Text::Tabs" upgraded to version 2005.0824
+ Provides a faster implementation of "expand"
+ "Text::Wrap" upgraded to version 2005.082401
+ Adds $Text::Wrap::separator2, which allows you to
preserve existing newlines but add line-breaks with
some other string.
+ "threads" upgraded to version 1.07
+ "threads" will now honour "no warnings 'threads'"
+ A thread's interpreter is now freed after
"$t->join()" rather than after "undef $t", which
should fix some "ithreads" memory leaks. (Fixed by
Dave Mitchell)
+ Some documentation typo fixes.
+ "threads::shared" upgraded to version 0.94
+ Documentation changes only
+ Note: An improved implementation of
"threads::shared" is available on CPAN - this will
be merged into 5.8.9 if it proves stable.
+ "Tie::Hash" upgraded to version 1.02
+ Documentation typo fixed
+ "Time::HiRes" upgraded to version 1.86 (was 1.66)
+ "clock_nanosleep()" and "clock()" functions added
+ Support for the POSIX "clock_gettime()" and
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"clock_getres()" has been added
+ Return "undef" or an empty list if the C "gettimeof-
day()" function fails
+ Improved "nanosleep" detection
+ Internal cleanup
+ Enhanced documentation
+ "Unicode::Collate" upgraded to version 0.52
+ Now implements UCA Revision 14 (based on Unicode
4.1.0).
+ "Unicode::Collate-"new> method no longer overwrites
user's $_
+ Enhanced documentation
+ "Unicode::UCD" upgraded to version 0.24
+ Documentation typos fixed
+ "User::grent" upgraded to version 1.01
+ Documentation typo fixed
+ "utf8" upgraded to version 1.06
+ Documentation typos fixed
+ "vmsish" upgraded to version 1.02
+ Documentation typos fixed
+ "warnings" upgraded to version 1.05
+ Gentler messing with "Carp::" internals
+ Internal cleanup
+ Documentation update
+ "Win32" upgraded to version 0.2601
+ Provides Windows Vista support to "Win32::GetOSName"
+ Documentation enhancements
+ "XS::Typemap" upgraded to version 0.02
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+ Internal cleanup
Utility Changes
"h2xs" enhancements
"h2xs" implements new option "--use-xsloader" to force use
of "XSLoader" even in backwards compatible modules.
The handling of authors' names that had apostrophes has been
fixed.
Any enums with negative values are now skipped.
"perlivp" enhancements
"perlivp" implements new option "-a" and will not check for
*.ph files by default any more. Use the "-a" option to run
all tests.
New Documentation
The perlglossary manpage is a glossary of terms used in the
Perl documentation, technical and otherwise, kindly provided
by O'Reilly Media, inc.
Performance Enhancements
+ Weak reference creation is now O(1) rather than O(n),
courtesy of Nicholas Clark. Weak reference deletion
remains O(n), but if deletion only happens at program
exit, it may be skipped completely.
+ Salvador Fandiqo provided improvements to reduce the
memory usage of "sort" and to speed up some cases.
+ Jarkko Hietaniemi and Andy Lester worked to mark as much
data as possible in the C source files as "static", to
increase the proportion of the executable file that the
operating system can share between process, and thus
reduce real memory usage on multi-user systems.
Installation and Configuration Improvements
Parallel makes should work properly now, although there may
still be problems if "make test" is instructed to run in
parallel.
Building with Borland's compilers on Win32 should work more
smoothly. In particular Steve Hay has worked to side step
many warnings emitted by their compilers and at least one C
compiler internal error.
"Configure" will now detect "clearenv" and "unsetenv",
thanks to a patch from Alan Burlison. It will also probe for
"futimes" and whether "sprintf" correctly returns the length
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of the formatted string, which will both be used in perl
5.8.9.
There are improved hints for next-3.0, vmesa, IX, Darwin,
Solaris, Linux, DEC/OSF, HP-UX and MPE/iX
Perl extensions on Windows now can be statically built into
the Perl DLL, thanks to a work by Vadim Konovalov. (This
improvement was actually in 5.8.7, but was accidentally
omitted from perl587delta).
Selected Bug Fixes
no warnings 'category' works correctly with -w
Previously when running with warnings enabled globally via
"-w", selective disabling of specific warning categories
would actually turn off all warnings. This is now fixed; now
"no warnings 'io';" will only turn off warnings in the "io"
class. Previously it would erroneously turn off all warn-
ings.
This bug fix may cause some programs to start correctly
issuing warnings.
Remove over-optimisation
Perl 5.8.4 introduced a change so that assignments of
"undef" to a scalar, or of an empty list to an array or a
hash, were optimised away. As this could cause problems when
"goto" jumps were involved, this change has been backed out.
sprintf() fixes
Using the sprintf() function with some formats could lead to
a buffer overflow in some specific cases. This has been
fixed, along with several other bugs, notably in bounds
checking.
In related fixes, it was possible for badly written code
that did not follow the documentation of "Sys::Syslog" to
have formatting vulnerabilities. "Sys::Syslog" has been
changed to protect people from poor quality third party
code.
Debugger and Unicode slowdown
It had been reported that running under perl's debugger when
processing Unicode data could cause unexpectedly large slow-
downs. The most likely cause of this was identified and
fixed by Nicholas Clark.
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Smaller fixes
+ "FindBin" now works better with directories where access
rights are more restrictive than usual.
+ Several memory leaks in ithreads were closed. An
improved implementation of "threads::shared" is avail-
able on CPAN - this will be merged into 5.8.9 if it
proves stable.
+ Trailing spaces are now trimmed from $! and $^E.
+ Operations that require perl to read a process' list of
groups, such as reads of $( and $), now dynamically
allocate memory rather than using a fixed sized array.
The fixed size array could cause C stack exhaustion on
systems configured to use large numbers of groups.
+ "PerlIO::scalar" now works better with non-default $/
settings.
+ You can now use the "x" operator to repeat a "qw//"
list. This used to raise a syntax error.
+ The debugger now traces correctly execution in
eval("")uated code that contains #line directives.
+ The value of the "open" pragma is no longer ignored for
three-argument opens.
+ The optimisation of "for (reverse @a)" introduced in
perl 5.8.6 could misbehave when the array had undefined
elements and was used in LVALUE context. Dave Mitchell
provided a fix.
+ Some case insensitive matches between UTF-8 encoded data
and 8 bit regexps, and vice versa, could give malformed
character warnings. These have been fixed by Dave
Mitchell and Yves Orton.
+ "lcfirst" and "ucfirst" could corrupt the string for
certain cases where the length UTF-8 encoding of the
string in lower case, upper case or title case differed.
This was fixed by Nicholas Clark.
+ Perl will now use the C library calls "unsetenv" and
"clearenv" if present to delete keys from %ENV and
delete %ENV entirely, thanks to a patch from Alan
Burlison.
New or Changed Diagnosticsperl v5.8.8 2006-06-30 14
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Attempt to set length of freed array
This is a new warning, produced in situations such as this:
$r = do {my @a; \$#a};
$$r = 503;
Non-string passed as bitmask
This is a new warning, produced when number has been passed
as a argument to select(), instead of a bitmask.
# Wrong, will now warn
$rin = fileno(STDIN);
($nfound,$timeleft) = select($rout=$rin, undef, undef, $timeout);
# Should be
$rin = '';
vec($rin,fileno(STDIN),1) = 1;
($nfound,$timeleft) = select($rout=$rin, undef, undef, $timeout);
Search pattern not terminated or ternary operator parsed as
search pattern
This syntax error indicates that the lexer couldn't find the
final delimiter of a "?PATTERN?" construct. Mentioning the
ternary operator in this error message makes it easier to
diagnose syntax errors.
Changed Internals
There has been a fair amount of refactoring of the "C"
source code, partly to make it tidier and more maintainable.
The resulting object code and the "perl" binary may well be
smaller than 5.8.7, in particular due to a change contri-
buted by Dave Mitchell which reworked the warnings code to
be significantly smaller. Apart from being smaller and pos-
sibly faster, there should be no user-detectable changes.
Andy Lester supplied many improvements to determine which
function parameters and local variables could actually be
declared "const" to the C compiler. Steve Peters provided
new *_set macros and reworked the core to use these rather
than assigning to macros in LVALUE context.
Dave Mitchell improved the lexer debugging output under
"-DT"
Nicholas Clark changed the string buffer allocation so that
it is now rounded up to the next multiple of 4 (or 8 on
platforms with 64 bit pointers). This should reduce the
number of calls to "realloc" without actually using any
extra memory.
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The "HV"'s array of "HE*"s is now allocated at the correct
(minimal) size, thanks to another change by Nicholas Clark.
Compile with "-DPERL_USE_LARGE_HV_ALLOC" to use the old,
sloppier, default.
For XS or embedding debugging purposes, if perl is compiled
with "-DDEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS_FORK_DUMP" in addition to
"-DDEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS" then a child process is "fork"ed
just before global destruction, which is used to display the
values of any scalars found to have leaked at the end of
global destruction. Without this, the scalars have already
been freed sufficiently at the point of detection that it is
impossible to produce any meaningful dump of their contents.
This feature was implemented by the indefatigable Nicholas
Clark, based on an idea by Mike Giroux.
Platform Specific Problems
The optimiser on HP-UX 11.23 (Itanium 2) is currently partly
disabled (scaled down to +O1) when using HP C-ANSI-C; the
cause of problems at higher optimisation levels is still
unclear.
There are a handful of remaining test failures on VMS,
mostly due to test fixes and minor module tweaks with too
many dependencies to integrate into this release from the
development stream, where they have all been corrected. The
following is a list of expected failures with the patch
number of the fix where that is known:
ext/Devel/PPPort/t/ppphtest.t #26913
ext/List/Util/t/p_tainted.t #26912
lib/ExtUtils/t/PL_FILES.t #26813
lib/ExtUtils/t/basic.t #26813
t/io/fs.t
t/op/cmp.t
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/
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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.
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