perl587delta(1)

1PERL587DELTA(1)        Perl Programmers Reference Guide        PERL587DELTA(1)
2
3
4

NAME

6       perl587delta - what is new for perl v5.8.7
7

DESCRIPTION

9       This document describes differences between the 5.8.6 release and the
10       5.8.7 release.
11

Incompatible Changes

13       There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.6.
14

Core Enhancements

16   Unicode Character Database 4.1.0
17       The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has
18       been updated to 4.1.0 from 4.0.1. See
19       <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.1.0/#NotableChanges> for the
20       notable changes.
21
22   suidperl less insecure
23       A pair of exploits in "suidperl" involving debugging code have been
24       closed.
25
26       For new projects the core perl team strongly recommends that you use
27       dedicated, single purpose security tools such as "sudo" in preference
28       to "suidperl".
29
30   Optional site customization script
31       The perl interpreter can be built to allow the use of a site
32       customization script. By default this is not enabled, to be consistent
33       with previous perl releases. To use this, add "-Dusesitecustomize" to
34       the command line flags when running the "Configure" script. See also
35       "-f" in perlrun.
36
37   "Config.pm" is now much smaller.
38       "Config.pm" is now about 3K rather than 32K, with the infrequently used
39       code and %Config values loaded on demand. This is transparent to the
40       programmer, but means that most code will save parsing and loading 29K
41       of script (for example, code that uses "File::Find").
42

Modules and Pragmata

44       ·   B upgraded to version 1.09
45
46       ·   base upgraded to version 2.07
47
48       ·   bignum upgraded to version 0.17
49
50       ·   bytes upgraded to version 1.02
51
52       ·   Carp upgraded to version 1.04
53
54       ·   CGI upgraded to version 3.10
55
56       ·   Class::ISA upgraded to version 0.33
57
58       ·   Data::Dumper upgraded to version 2.121_02
59
60       ·   DB_File upgraded to version 1.811
61
62       ·   Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.06
63
64       ·   Digest upgraded to version 1.10
65
66       ·   Encode upgraded to version 2.10
67
68       ·   FileCache upgraded to version 1.05
69
70       ·   File::Path upgraded to version 1.07
71
72       ·   File::Temp upgraded to version 0.16
73
74       ·   IO::File upgraded to version 1.11
75
76       ·   IO::Socket upgraded to version 1.28
77
78       ·   Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.77
79
80       ·   Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.15
81
82       ·   overload upgraded to version 1.03
83
84       ·   PathTools upgraded to version 3.05
85
86       ·   Pod::HTML upgraded to version 1.0503
87
88       ·   Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.14
89
90       ·   Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.58
91
92       ·   Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.30
93
94       ·   Symbol upgraded to version 1.06
95
96       ·   Term::ANSIColor upgraded to version 1.09
97
98       ·   Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.48
99
100       ·   Test::Simple upgraded to version 0.54
101
102       ·   Text::Wrap upgraded to version 2001.09293, to fix a bug when wrap()
103           was called with a non-space separator.
104
105       ·   threads::shared upgraded to version 0.93
106
107       ·   Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.66
108
109       ·   Time::Local upgraded to version 1.11
110
111       ·   Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.32
112
113       ·   utf8 upgraded to version 1.05
114
115       ·   Win32 upgraded to version 0.24, which provides
116           Win32::GetFileVersion
117

Utility Changes

119   find2perl enhancements
120       "find2perl" has new options "-iname", "-path" and "-ipath".
121

Performance Enhancements

123       The internal pointer mapping hash used during ithreads cloning now uses
124       an arena for memory allocation. In tests this reduced ithreads cloning
125       time by about 10%.
126

Installation and Configuration Improvements

128       ·   The Win32 "dmake" makefile.mk has been updated to make it
129           compatible with the latest versions of dmake.
130
131       ·   "PERL_MALLOC", "DEBUG_MSTATS", "PERL_HASH_SEED_EXPLICIT" and
132           "NO_HASH_SEED" should now work in Win32 makefiles.
133

Selected Bug Fixes

135       ·   The socket() function on Win32 has been fixed so that it is able to
136           use transport providers which specify a protocol of 0 (meaning any
137           protocol is allowed) once more.  (This was broken in 5.8.6, and
138           typically caused the use of ICMP sockets to fail.)
139
140       ·   Another obscure bug involving "substr" and UTF-8 caused by bad
141           internal offset caching has been identified and fixed.
142
143       ·   A bug involving the loading of UTF-8 tables by the regexp engine
144           has been fixed - code such as ""\x{100}" =~ /[[:print:]]/" will no
145           longer give corrupt results.
146
147       ·   Case conversion operations such as "uc" on a long Unicode string
148           could exhaust memory. This has been fixed.
149
150       ·   "index"/"rindex" were buggy for some combinations of Unicode and
151           non-Unicode data. This has been fixed.
152
153       ·   "read" (and presumably "sysread") would expose the UTF-8 internals
154           when reading from a byte oriented file handle into a UTF-8 scalar.
155           This has been fixed.
156
157       ·   Several "pack"/"unpack" bug fixes:
158
159           ·   Checksums with "b" or "B" formats were broken.
160
161           ·   "unpack" checksums could overflow with the "C" format.
162
163           ·   "U0" and "C0" are now scoped to "()" "pack" sub-templates.
164
165           ·   Counted length prefixes now don't change "C0"/"U0" mode.
166
167           ·   "pack" "Z0" used to destroy the preceding character.
168
169           ·   "P"/"p" "pack" formats used to only recognise literal "undef"
170
171       ·   Using closures with ithreads could cause perl to crash. This was
172           due to failure to correctly lock internal OP structures, and has
173           been fixed.
174
175       ·   The return value of "close" now correctly reflects any file errors
176           that occur while flushing the handle's data, instead of just giving
177           failure if the actual underlying file close operation failed.
178
179       ·   "not() || 1" used to segfault. "not()" now behaves like not(0),
180           which was the pre 5.6.0 behaviour.
181
182       ·   "h2ph" has various enhancements to cope with constructs in header
183           files that used to result in incorrect or invalid output.
184

New or Changed Diagnostics

186       There is a new taint error, "%ENV is aliased to %s". This error is
187       thrown when taint checks are enabled and when *ENV has been aliased, so
188       that %ENV has no env-magic anymore and hence the environment cannot be
189       verified as taint-free.
190
191       The internals of "pack" and "unpack" have been updated. All legitimate
192       templates should work as before, but there may be some changes in the
193       error reported for complex failure cases. Any behaviour changes for
194       non-error cases are bugs, and should be reported.
195

Changed Internals

197       There has been a fair amount of refactoring of the "C" source code,
198       partly to make it tidier and more maintainable. The resulting object
199       code and the "perl" binary may well be smaller than 5.8.6, and
200       hopefully faster in some cases, but apart from this there should be no
201       user-detectable changes.
202
203       "${^UTF8LOCALE}" has been added to give perl space access to
204       "PL_utf8locale".
205
206       The size of the arenas used to allocate SV heads and most SV bodies can
207       now be changed at compile time. The old size was 1008 bytes, the new
208       default size is 4080 bytes.
209

Known Problems

211       Unicode strings returned from overloaded operators can be buggy. This
212       is a long standing bug reported since 5.8.6 was released, but we do not
213       yet have a suitable fix for it.
214

Platform Specific Problems

216       On UNICOS, lib/Math/BigInt/t/bigintc.t hangs burning CPU.
217       ext/B/t/bytecode.t and ext/Socket/t/socketpair.t both fail tests.
218       These are unlikely to be resolved, as our valiant UNICOS porter's last
219       Cray is being decommissioned.
220

Reporting Bugs

222       If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
223       recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
224       database at http://bugs.perl.org.  There may also be information at
225       http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page.
226
227       If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
228       program included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a
229       tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output
230       of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
231       the Perl porting team.  You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at
232       http://bugs.perl.org/
233