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 CWsuidperl 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 CWsudo in preference to
CWsuidperl.
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 CW-Dusesitecustomize to the command line flags
when running the CWConfigure script. See also “-f” in perlrun.
CWConfig.pm is now about 3K rather than 32K, with the infrequently used
code and CW%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 CWFile::Find).
Modules and Pragmata
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B upgraded to version 1.09
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base upgraded to version 2.07
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bignum upgraded to version 0.17
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bytes upgraded to version 1.02
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Carp upgraded to version 1.04
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\s-1CGI\s0 upgraded to version 3.10
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Class::ISA upgraded to version 0.33
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Data::Dumper upgraded to version 2.121_02
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DB_File upgraded to version 1.811
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Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.06
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Digest upgraded to version 1.10
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Encode upgraded to version 2.10
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FileCache upgraded to version 1.05
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File::Path upgraded to version 1.07
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File::Temp upgraded to version 0.16
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IO::File upgraded to version 1.11
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IO::Socket upgraded to version 1.28
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Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.77
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Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.15
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overload upgraded to version 1.03
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PathTools upgraded to version 3.05
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Pod::HTML upgraded to version 1.0503
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Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.14
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Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.58
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Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.30
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Symbol upgraded to version 1.06
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Term::ANSIColor upgraded to version 1.09
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Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.48
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Test::Simple upgraded to version 0.54
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Text::Wrap upgraded to version 2001.09293, to fix a bug when wrap() was
called with a non-space separator.
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threads::shared upgraded to version 0.93
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Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.66
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Time::Local upgraded to version 1.11
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Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.32
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utf8 upgraded to version 1.05
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Win32 upgraded to version 0.24, which provides Win32::GetFileVersion
Utility Changes
find2perl enhancements
CWfind2perl has new options CW-iname, CW-path and CW-ipath.
Performance Enhancements
The internal pointer mapping hash used during ithreads cloning now uses an
arena for memory allocation. In tests this reduced ithreads cloning time by
about 10%.
Installation and Configuration Improvements
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The Win32 “dmake” makefile.mk has been updated to make it compatible
with the latest versions of dmake.
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CWPERL_MALLOC, CWDEBUG_MSTATS, CWPERL_HASH_SEED_EXPLICIT and CWNO_HASH_SEED
should now work in Win32 makefiles.
Selected Bug Fixes
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The socket() function on Win32 has been fixed so that it is able to use
transport providers which specify a protocol of 0 (meaning any protocol
is allowed) once more. (This was broken in 5.8.6, and typically caused
the use of \s-1ICMP\s0 sockets to fail.)
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Another obscure bug involving CWsubstr and \s-1UTF-8\s0 caused by bad internal
offset caching has been identified and fixed.
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A bug involving the loading of \s-1UTF-8\s0 tables by the regexp engine has been
fixed - code such as CW"\x{100}" =~ /[[:print:]]/ will no longer give
corrupt results.
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Case conversion operations such as CWuc on a long Unicode string could
exhaust memory. This has been fixed.
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CWindex/CWrindex were buggy for some combinations of Unicode and
non-Unicode data. This has been fixed.
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CWread (and presumably CWsysread) would expose the \s-1UTF-8\s0 internals when
reading from a byte oriented file handle into a \s-1UTF-8\s0 scalar. This has
been fixed.
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Several CWpack
/CWunpack bug fixes:
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Checksums with CWb or CWB formats were broken.
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CWunpack checksums could overflow with the CWC format.
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CWU0 and CWC0 are now scoped to CW() CWpack sub-templates.
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Counted length prefixes now don't change CWC0/CWU0 mode.
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CWpack CWZ0 used to destroy the preceding character.
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CWP
/CWp CWpack formats used to only recognise literal CWundef
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Using closures with ithreads could cause perl to crash. This was due to
failure to correctly lock internal \s-1OP\s0 structures, and has been fixed.
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The return value of CWclose 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.
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CWnot() || 1 used to segfault. CWnot() now behaves like CWnot(0), which was
the pre 5.6.0 behaviour.
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CWh2ph 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 CW%s”. This error is thrown
when taint checks are enabled and when CW*ENV has been aliased, so that
CW%ENV has no env-magic anymore and hence the environment cannot be verified
as taint-free.
The internals of CWpack and CWunpack 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 CWC source code, partly to
make it tidier and more maintainable. The resulting object code and the
CWperl 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.
CW${^UTF8LOCALE} has been added to give perl space access to CWPL_utf8locale.
The size of the arenas used to allocate \s-1SV\s0 heads and most \s-1SV\s0 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 \s-1UNICOS\s0, lib/Math/BigInt/t/bigintc.t hangs burning \s-1CPU\s0.
ext/B/t/bytecode.t and ext/Socket/t/socketpair.t both fail tests.
These are unlikely to be resolved, as our valiant \s-1UNICOS\s0 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 newsgroup 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 CWperl -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 \s-1INSTALL\s0 file for how to build Perl.
The \s-1README\s0 file for general stuff.
The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
