1PERL584DELTA(1)        Perl Programmers Reference Guide        PERL584DELTA(1)
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NAME

6       perl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4
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DESCRIPTION

9       This document describes differences between the 5.8.3 release and the
10       5.8.4 release.
11

Incompatible Changes

13       Many minor bugs have been fixed. Scripts which happen to rely on
14       previously erroneous behaviour will consider these fixes as
15       incompatible changes :-) You are advised to perform sufficient
16       acceptance testing on this release to satisfy yourself that this does
17       not affect you, before putting this release into production.
18
19       The diagnostic output of Carp has been changed slightly, to add a space
20       after the comma between arguments. This makes it much easier for tools
21       such as web browsers to wrap it, but might confuse any automatic tools
22       which perform detailed parsing of Carp output.
23
24       The internal dump output has been improved, so that non-printable
25       characters such as newline and backspace are output in "\x" notation,
26       rather than octal. This might just confuse non-robust tools which parse
27       the output of modules such as Devel::Peek.
28

Core Enhancements

30   Malloc wrapping
31       Perl can now be built to detect attempts to assign pathologically large
32       chunks of memory.  Previously such assignments would suffer from
33       integer wrap-around during size calculations causing a misallocation,
34       which would crash perl, and could theoretically be used for "stack
35       smashing" attacks.  The wrapping defaults to enabled on platforms where
36       we know it works (most AIX configurations, BSDi, Darwin, DEC OSF/1,
37       FreeBSD, HP/UX, GNU Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, VMS and most Win32
38       compilers) and defaults to disabled on other platforms.
39
40   Unicode Character Database 4.0.1
41       The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has
42       been updated to 4.0.1 from 4.0.0.
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44   suidperl less insecure
45       Paul Szabo has analysed and patched "suidperl" to remove existing known
46       insecurities. Currently there are no known holes in "suidperl", but
47       previous experience shows that we cannot be confident that these were
48       the last. You may no longer invoke the set uid perl directly, so to
49       preserve backwards compatibility with scripts that invoke
50       #!/usr/bin/suidperl the only set uid binary is now "sperl5.8."n
51       ("sperl5.8.4" for this release). "suidperl" is installed as a hard link
52       to "perl"; both "suidperl" and "perl" will invoke "sperl5.8.4"
53       automatically the set uid binary, so this change should be completely
54       transparent.
55
56       For new projects the core perl team would strongly recommend that you
57       use dedicated, single purpose security tools such as "sudo" in
58       preference to "suidperl".
59
60   format
61       In addition to bug fixes, "format"'s features have been enhanced. See
62       perlform
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Modules and Pragmata

65       The (mis)use of "/tmp" in core modules and documentation has been
66       tidied up.  Some modules available both within the perl core and
67       independently from CPAN ("dual-life modules") have not yet had these
68       changes applied; the changes will be integrated into future stable perl
69       releases as the modules are updated on CPAN.
70
71   Updated modules
72       Attribute::Handlers
73       B
74       Benchmark
75       CGI
76       Carp
77       Cwd
78       Exporter
79       File::Find
80       IO
81       IPC::Open3
82       Local::Maketext
83       Math::BigFloat
84       Math::BigInt
85       Math::BigRat
86       MIME::Base64
87       ODBM_File
88       POSIX
89       Shell
90       Socket
91           There is experimental support for Linux abstract Unix domain
92           sockets.
93
94       Storable
95       Switch
96           Synced with its CPAN version 2.10
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98       Sys::Syslog
99           "syslog()" can now use numeric constants for facility names and
100           priorities, in addition to strings.
101
102       Term::ANSIColor
103       Time::HiRes
104       Unicode::UCD
105       Win32
106           Win32.pm/Win32.xs has moved from the libwin32 module to core Perl
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108       base
109       open
110       threads
111           Detached threads are now also supported on Windows.
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113       utf8
114

Performance Enhancements

116       ·   Accelerated Unicode case mappings ("/i", "lc", "uc", etc).
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118       ·   In place sort optimised (eg "@a = sort @a")
119
120       ·   Unnecessary assignment optimised away in
121
122             my $s = undef;
123             my @a = ();
124             my %h = ();
125
126       ·   Optimised "map" in scalar context
127

Utility Changes

129       The Perl debugger (lib/perl5db.pl) can now save all debugger commands
130       for sourcing later, and can display the parent inheritance tree of a
131       given class.
132

Installation and Configuration Improvements

134       The build process on both VMS and Windows has had several minor
135       improvements made. On Windows Borland's C compiler can now compile perl
136       with PerlIO and/or USE_LARGE_FILES enabled.
137
138       "perl.exe" on Windows now has a "Camel" logo icon. The use of a camel
139       with the topic of Perl is a trademark of O'Reilly and Associates Inc.,
140       and is used with their permission (ie distribution of the source,
141       compiling a Windows executable from it, and using that executable
142       locally). Use of the supplied camel for anything other than a perl
143       executable's icon is specifically not covered, and anyone wishing to
144       redistribute perl binaries with the icon should check directly with
145       O'Reilly beforehand.
146
147       Perl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more.
148

Selected Bug Fixes

150       More utf8 bugs fixed, notably in how "chomp", "chop", "send", and
151       "syswrite" and interact with utf8 data. Concatenation now works
152       correctly when "use bytes;" is in scope.
153
154       Pragmata are now correctly propagated into (?{...}) constructions in
155       regexps.  Code such as
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157          my $x = qr{ ... (??{ $x }) ... };
158
159       will now (correctly) fail under use strict. (As the inner $x is and has
160       always referred to $::x)
161
162       The "const in void context" warning has been suppressed for a constant
163       in an optimised-away boolean expression such as "5 || print;"
164
165       "perl -i" could "fchmod(stdin)" by mistake. This is serious if stdin is
166       attached to a terminal, and perl is running as root. Now fixed.
167

New or Changed Diagnostics

169       "Carp" and the internal diagnostic routines used by "Devel::Peek" have
170       been made clearer, as described in "Incompatible Changes"
171

Changed Internals

173       Some bugs have been fixed in the hash internals. Restricted hashes and
174       their place holders are now allocated and deleted at slightly different
175       times, but this should not be visible to user code.
176

Future Directions

178       Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.5) will be on 30th
179       June 2004, with release by mid July.
180

Platform Specific Problems

182       This release is known not to build on Windows 95.
183

Reporting Bugs

185       If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
186       recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
187       database at http://bugs.perl.org.  There may also be information at
188       http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page.
189
190       If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
191       program included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a
192       tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output
193       of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
194       the Perl porting team.  You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at
195       http://bugs.perl.org/
196

SEE ALSO

198       The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.
199
200       The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
201
202       The README file for general stuff.
203
204       The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
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208perl v5.10.1                      2009-02-12                   PERL584DELTA(1)
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