1N/A=head1 NAME
1N/A
1N/Aperldelta - what is new for perl v5.8.4
1N/A
1N/A=head1 DESCRIPTION
1N/A
1N/AThis document describes differences between the 5.8.3 release and
1N/Athe 5.8.4 release.
1N/A
1N/A=head1 Incompatible Changes
1N/A
1N/AMany minor bugs have been fixed. Scripts which happen to rely on previously
1N/Aerroneous behaviour will consider these fixes as incompatible changes :-)
1N/AYou are advised to perform sufficient acceptance testing on this release
1N/Ato satisfy yourself that this does not affect you, before putting this
1N/Arelease into production.
1N/A
1N/AThe diagnostic output of Carp has been changed slightly, to add a space after
1N/Athe comma between arguments. This makes it much easier for tools such as
1N/Aweb browsers to wrap it, but might confuse any automatic tools which perform
1N/Adetailed parsing of Carp output.
1N/A
1N/AThe internal dump output has been improved, so that non-printable characters
1N/Asuch as newline and backspace are output in C<\x> notation, rather than
1N/Aoctal. This might just confuse non-robust tools which parse the output of
1N/Amodules such as Devel::Peek.
1N/A
1N/A=head1 Core Enhancements
1N/A
1N/A=head2 Malloc wrapping
1N/A
1N/APerl can now be built to detect attempts to assign pathologically large chunks
1N/Aof memory. Previously such assignments would suffer from integer wrap-around
1N/Aduring size calculations causing a misallocation, which would crash perl, and
1N/Acould theoretically be used for "stack smashing" attacks. The wrapping
1N/Adefaults to enabled on platforms where we know it works (most AIX
1N/Aconfigurations, BSDi, Darwin, DEC OSF/1, FreeBSD, HP/UX, GNU Linux, OpenBSD,
1N/ASolaris, VMS and most Win32 compilers) and defaults to disabled on other
1N/Aplatforms.
1N/A
1N/A=head2 Unicode Character Database 4.0.1
1N/A
1N/AThe copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has
1N/Abeen updated to 4.0.1 from 4.0.0.
1N/A
1N/A=head2 suidperl less insecure
1N/A
1N/APaul Szabo has analysed and patched C<suidperl> to remove existing known
1N/Ainsecurities. Currently there are no known holes in C<suidperl>, but previous
1N/Aexperience shows that we cannot be confident that these were the last. You may
1N/Ano longer invoke the set uid perl directly, so to preserve backwards
1N/Acompatibility with scripts that invoke #!/usr/bin/suidperl the only set uid
1N/Abinary is now C<sperl5.8.>I<n> (C<sperl5.8.4> for this release). C<suidperl>
1N/Ais installed as a hard link to C<perl>; both C<suidperl> and C<perl> will
1N/Ainvoke C<sperl5.8.4> automatically the set uid binary, so this change should
1N/Abe completely transparent.
1N/A
1N/AFor new projects the core perl team would strongly recommend that you use
1N/Adedicated, single purpose security tools such as C<sudo> in preference to
1N/AC<suidperl>.
1N/A
1N/A=head2 format
1N/A
1N/AIn addition to bug fixes, C<format>'s features have been enhanced. See
1N/AL<perlform>
1N/A
1N/A=head1 Modules and Pragmata
1N/A
1N/AThe (mis)use of C</tmp> in core modules and documentation has been tidied up.
1N/ASome modules available both within the perl core and independently from CPAN
1N/A("dual-life modules") have not yet had these changes applied; the changes
1N/Awill be integrated into future stable perl releases as the modules are
1N/Aupdated on CPAN.
1N/A
1N/A=head2 Updated modules
1N/A
1N/A=over 4
1N/A
1N/A=item Attribute::Handlers
1N/A
1N/A=item B
1N/A
1N/A=item Benchmark
1N/A
1N/A=item CGI
1N/A
1N/A=item Carp
1N/A
1N/A=item Cwd
1N/A
1N/A=item Exporter
1N/A
1N/A=item File::Find
1N/A
1N/A=item IO
1N/A
1N/A=item IPC::Open3
1N/A
1N/A=item Local::Maketext
1N/A
1N/A=item Math::BigFloat
1N/A
1N/A=item Math::BigInt
1N/A
1N/A=item Math::BigRat
1N/A
1N/A=item MIME::Base64
1N/A
1N/A=item ODBM_File
1N/A
1N/A=item POSIX
1N/A
1N/A=item Shell
1N/A
1N/A=item Socket
1N/A
1N/AThere is experimental support for Linux abstract Unix domain sockets.
1N/A
1N/A=item Storable
1N/A
1N/A=item Switch
1N/A
1N/ASynced with its CPAN version 2.10
1N/A
1N/A=item Sys::Syslog
1N/A
1N/AC<syslog()> can now use numeric constants for facility names and priorities,
1N/Ain addition to strings.
1N/A
1N/A=item Term::ANSIColor
1N/A
1N/A=item Time::HiRes
1N/A
1N/A=item Unicode::UCD
1N/A
1N/A=item Win32
1N/A
1N/AWin32.pm/Win32.xs has moved from the libwin32 module to core Perl
1N/A
1N/A=item base
1N/A
1N/A=item open
1N/A
1N/A=item threads
1N/A
1N/ADetached threads are now also supported on Windows.
1N/A
1N/A=item utf8
1N/A
1N/A=back
1N/A
1N/A=head1 Performance Enhancements
1N/A
1N/A=over 4
1N/A
1N/A=item *
1N/A
1N/AAccelerated Unicode case mappings (C</i>, C<lc>, C<uc>, etc).
1N/A
1N/A=item *
1N/A
1N/AIn place sort optimised (eg C<@a = sort @a>)
1N/A
1N/A=item *
1N/A
1N/AUnnecessary assignment optimised away in
1N/A
1N/A my $s = undef;
1N/A my @a = ();
1N/A my %h = ();
1N/A
1N/A=item *
1N/A
1N/AOptimised C<map> in scalar context
1N/A
1N/A=back
1N/A
1N/A=head1 Utility Changes
1N/A
1N/AThe Perl debugger (F<lib/perl5db.pl>) can now save all debugger commands for
1N/Asourcing later, and can display the parent inheritance tree of a given class.
1N/A
1N/A=head1 Installation and Configuration Improvements
1N/A
1N/AThe build process on both VMS and Windows has had several minor improvements
1N/Amade. On Windows Borland's C compiler can now compile perl with PerlIO and/or
1N/AUSE_LARGE_FILES enabled.
1N/A
1N/AC<perl.exe> on Windows now has a "Camel" logo icon. The use of a camel with
1N/Athe topic of Perl is a trademark of O'Reilly and Associates Inc., and is used
1N/Awith their permission (ie distribution of the source, compiling a Windows
1N/Aexecutable from it, and using that executable locally). Use of the supplied
1N/Acamel for anything other than a perl executable's icon is specifically not
1N/Acovered, and anyone wishing to redistribute perl binaries I<with> the icon
1N/Ashould check directly with O'Reilly beforehand.
1N/A
1N/APerl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more.
1N/A
1N/A=head1 Selected Bug Fixes
1N/A
1N/AMore utf8 bugs fixed, notably in how C<chomp>, C<chop>, C<send>, and
1N/AC<syswrite> and interact with utf8 data. Concatenation now works correctly
1N/Awhen C<use bytes;> is in scope.
1N/A
1N/APragmata are now correctly propagated into (?{...}) constructions in regexps.
1N/ACode such as
1N/A
1N/A my $x = qr{ ... (??{ $x }) ... };
1N/A
1N/Awill now (correctly) fail under use strict. (As the inner C<$x> is and
1N/Ahas always referred to C<$::x>)
1N/A
1N/AThe "const in void context" warning has been suppressed for a constant in an
1N/Aoptimised-away boolean expression such as C<5 || print;>
1N/A
1N/AC<perl -i> could C<fchmod(stdin)> by mistake. This is serious if stdin is
1N/Aattached to a terminal, and perl is running as root. Now fixed.
1N/A
1N/A=head1 New or Changed Diagnostics
1N/A
1N/AC<Carp> and the internal diagnostic routines used by C<Devel::Peek> have been
1N/Amade clearer, as described in L</Incompatible Changes>
1N/A
1N/A=head1 Changed Internals
1N/A
1N/ASome bugs have been fixed in the hash internals. Restricted hashes and
1N/Atheir place holders are now allocated and deleted at slightly different times,
1N/Abut this should not be visible to user code.
1N/A
1N/A=head1 Future Directions
1N/A
1N/ACode freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.5) will be on 30th June
1N/A2004, with release by mid July.
1N/A
1N/A=head1 Platform Specific Problems
1N/A
1N/AThis release is known not to build on Windows 95.
1N/A
1N/A=head1 Reporting Bugs
1N/A
1N/AIf you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
1N/Arecently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl
1N/Abug database at http://bugs.perl.org. There may also be
1N/Ainformation at http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page.
1N/A
1N/AIf you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the B<perlbug>
1N/Aprogram included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down
1N/Ato a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the
1N/Aoutput of C<perl -V>, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be
1N/Aanalysed by the Perl porting team. You can browse and search
1N/Athe Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/
1N/A
1N/A=head1 SEE ALSO
1N/A
1N/AThe F<Changes> file for exhaustive details on what changed.
1N/A
1N/AThe F<INSTALL> file for how to build Perl.
1N/A
1N/AThe F<README> file for general stuff.
1N/A
1N/AThe F<Artistic> and F<Copying> files for copyright information.
1N/A
1N/A=cut