1:perl584delta

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      perl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4

Contents

DESCRIPTION

      This document describes differences between the 5.8.3 release and the 5.8.4 release.

Incompatible Changes

      Many minor bugs have been fixed. Scripts which happen to rely on previously erroneous behaviour will consider
      these fixes as incompatible changes :-) You are advised to perform sufficient acceptance testing on this release
      to satisfy yourself that this does not affect you, before putting this release into production.
 
      The diagnostic output of Carp has been changed slightly, to add a space after the comma between arguments. This
      makes it much easier for tools such as web browsers to wrap it, but might confuse any automatic tools which per-
      form detailed parsing of Carp output.
 
      The internal dump output has been improved, so that non-printable characters such as newline and backspace are
      output in "\x" notation, rather than octal. This might just confuse non-robust tools which parse the output of
      modules such as Devel::Peek.

Core Enhancements

      Malloc wrapping
 
      Perl can now be built to detect attempts to assign pathologically large chunks of memory.  Previously such
      assignments would suffer from integer wrap-around during size calculations causing a misallocation, which would
      crash perl, and could theoretically be used for "stack smashing" attacks.  The wrapping defaults to enabled on
      platforms where we know it works (most AIX configurations, BSDi, Darwin, DEC OSF/1, FreeBSD, HP/UX, GNU Linux,
      OpenBSD, Solaris, VMS and most Win32 compilers) and defaults to disabled on other platforms.
 
      Unicode Character Database 4.0.1
 
      The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has been updated to 4.0.1 from 4.0.0.
 
      suidperl less insecure
 
      Paul Szabo has analysed and patched "suidperl" to remove existing known insecurities. Currently there are no
      known holes in "suidperl", but previous experience shows that we cannot be confident that these were the last.
      You may no longer invoke the set uid perl directly, so to preserve backwards compatibility with scripts that
      invoke #!/usr/bin/suidperl the only set uid binary is now "sperl5.8."n ("sperl5.8.4" for this release). "suid-
      perl" is installed as a hard link to "perl"; both "suidperl" and "perl" will invoke "sperl5.8.4" automatically
      the set uid binary, so this change should be completely transparent.
 
      For new projects the core perl team would strongly recommend that you use dedicated, single purpose security
      tools such as "sudo" in preference to "suidperl".
 
      format
 
      In addition to bug fixes, "format"'s features have been enhanced. See perlform

Modules and Pragmata

      The (mis)use of "/tmp" in core modules and documentation has been tidied up.  Some modules available both within
      the perl core and independently from CPAN ("dual-life modules") have not yet had these changes applied; the
      changes will be integrated into future stable perl releases as the modules are updated on CPAN.
 
      Updated modules
 
      Attribute::Handlers
      B
      Benchmark
      CGI
      Carp
      Cwd
      Exporter
      File::Find
      IO
      IPC::Open3
      Local::Maketext
      Math::BigFloat
      Math::BigInt
      Math::BigRat
      MIME::Base64
      ODBM_File
      POSIX
      Shell
      Socket
          There is experimental support for Linux abstract Unix domain sockets.
 
      Storable
      Switch
          Synced with its CPAN version 2.10
 
      Sys::Syslog
          "syslog()" can now use numeric constants for facility names and priorities, in addition to strings.
 
      Term::ANSIColor
      Time::HiRes
      Unicode::UCD
      Win32
          Win32.pm/Win32.xs has moved from the libwin32 module to core Perl
 
      base
      open
      threads
          Detached threads are now also supported on Windows.
 
      utf8

Performance Enhancements

      �   Accelerated Unicode case mappings ("/i", "lc", "uc", etc).
 
      �   In place sort optimised (eg "@a = sort @a")
 
      �   Unnecessary assignment optimised away in
 
            my $s = undef;
            my @a = ();
            my %h = ();
 
      �   Optimised "map" in scalar context

Utility Changes

      The Perl debugger (lib/perl5db.pl) can now save all debugger commands for sourcing later, and can display the
      parent inheritance tree of a given class.

Installation and Configuration Improvements

      The build process on both VMS and Windows has had several minor improvements made. On Windows Borland's C com-
      piler can now compile perl with PerlIO and/or USE_LARGE_FILES enabled.
 
      "perl.exe" on Windows now has a "Camel" logo icon. The use of a camel with the topic of Perl is a trademark of
      O'Reilly and Associates Inc., and is used with their permission (ie distribution of the source, compiling a Win-
      dows executable from it, and using that executable locally). Use of the supplied camel for anything other than a
      perl executable's icon is specifically not covered, and anyone wishing to redistribute perl binaries with the
      icon should check directly with O'Reilly beforehand.
 
      Perl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more.

Selected Bug Fixes

      More utf8 bugs fixed, notably in how "chomp", "chop", "send", and "syswrite" and interact with utf8 data. Con-
      catenation now works correctly when "use bytes;" is in scope.
 
      Pragmata are now correctly propagated into (?{...}) constructions in regexps.  Code such as
 
         my $x = qr{ ... (??{ $x }) ... };
 
      will now (correctly) fail under use strict. (As the inner $x is and has always referred to $::x)
 
      The "const in void context" warning has been suppressed for a constant in an optimised-away boolean expression
      such as "5 || print;"
 
      "perl -i" could "fchmod(stdin)" by mistake. This is serious if stdin is attached to a terminal, and perl is run-
      ning as root. Now fixed.

New or Changed Diagnostics

      "Carp" and the internal diagnostic routines used by "Devel::Peek" have been made clearer, as described in "Incom-
      patible Changes"

Changed Internals

      Some bugs have been fixed in the hash internals. Restricted hashes and their place holders are now allocated and
      deleted at slightly different times, but this should not be visible to user code.

Future Directions

      Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.5) will be on 30th June 2004, with release by mid July.

Platform Specific Problems

      This release is known not to build on Windows 95.

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 "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/

RELATED

      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.

CATEGORY

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