1PERL584DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL584DELTA(1)
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6 perl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4
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9 This document describes differences between the 5.8.3 release and the
10 5.8.4 release.
11
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 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 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
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 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.
43 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 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 format
61 In addition to bug fixes, "format"'s features have been enhanced. See
62 perlform
63
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 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 Storable
95 Switch
96 Synced with its CPAN version 2.10
97 Sys::Syslog
99 "syslog()" can now use numeric constants for facility names and
100 priorities, in addition to strings.
101 Term::ANSIColor
103 Time::HiRes
104 Unicode::UCD
105 Win32
106 Win32.pm/Win32.xs has moved from the libwin32 module to core Perl
107 base
109 open
110 threads
111 Detached threads are now also supported on Windows.
112 utf8
114
116 · Accelerated Unicode case mappings ("/i", "lc", "uc", etc).
117 · In place sort optimised (eg "@a = sort @a")
119 · Unnecessary assignment optimised away in
121 my $s = undef;
123 my @a = ();
124 my %h = ();
125 · Optimised "map" in scalar context
127
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
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 "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 Perl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more.
148
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 Pragmata are now correctly propagated into (?{...}) constructions in
155 regexps. Code such as
156 my $x = qr{ ... (??{ $x }) ... };
158 will now (correctly) fail under use strict. (As the inner $x is and has
160 always referred to $::x)
161 The "const in void context" warning has been suppressed for a constant
163 in an optimised-away boolean expression such as "5 || print;"
164 "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
169 "Carp" and the internal diagnostic routines used by "Devel::Peek" have
170 been made clearer, as described in "Incompatible Changes"
171
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
178 Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.5) will be on 30th
179 June 2004, with release by mid July.
180
182 This release is known not to build on Windows 95.
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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 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
198 The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.
199 The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
201 The README file for general stuff.
203 The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
205perl v5.10.1 2009-02-12 PERL584DELTA(1)