1PERL587DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL587DELTA(1)
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6 perl587delta - what is new for perl v5.8.7
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9 This document describes differences between the 5.8.6 release and the
10 5.8.7 release.
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13 There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.6.
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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.
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22 suidperl less insecure
23 A pair of exploits in "suidperl" involving debugging code have been
24 closed.
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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".
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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.
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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").
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44 • B upgraded to version 1.09
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46 • base upgraded to version 2.07
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48 • bignum upgraded to version 0.17
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50 • bytes upgraded to version 1.02
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52 • Carp upgraded to version 1.04
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54 • CGI upgraded to version 3.10
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56 • Class::ISA upgraded to version 0.33
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58 • Data::Dumper upgraded to version 2.121_02
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60 • DB_File upgraded to version 1.811
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62 • Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.06
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64 • Digest upgraded to version 1.10
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66 • Encode upgraded to version 2.10
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68 • FileCache upgraded to version 1.05
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70 • File::Path upgraded to version 1.07
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72 • File::Temp upgraded to version 0.16
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74 • IO::File upgraded to version 1.11
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76 • IO::Socket upgraded to version 1.28
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78 • Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.77
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80 • Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.15
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82 • overload upgraded to version 1.03
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84 • PathTools upgraded to version 3.05
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86 • Pod::HTML upgraded to version 1.0503
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88 • Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.14
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90 • Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.58
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92 • Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.30
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94 • Symbol upgraded to version 1.06
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96 • Term::ANSIColor upgraded to version 1.09
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98 • Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.48
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100 • Test::Simple upgraded to version 0.54
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102 • Text::Wrap upgraded to version 2001.09293, to fix a bug when wrap()
103 was called with a non-space separator.
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105 • threads::shared upgraded to version 0.93
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107 • Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.66
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109 • Time::Local upgraded to version 1.11
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111 • Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.32
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113 • utf8 upgraded to version 1.05
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115 • Win32 upgraded to version 0.24, which provides
116 Win32::GetFileVersion
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119 find2perl enhancements
120 "find2perl" has new options "-iname", "-path" and "-ipath".
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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%.
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128 • The Win32 "dmake" makefile.mk has been updated to make it
129 compatible with the latest versions of dmake.
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131 • "PERL_MALLOC", "DEBUG_MSTATS", "PERL_HASH_SEED_EXPLICIT" and
132 "NO_HASH_SEED" should now work in Win32 makefiles.
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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.)
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140 • Another obscure bug involving "substr" and UTF-8 caused by bad
141 internal offset caching has been identified and fixed.
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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.
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147 • Case conversion operations such as "uc" on a long Unicode string
148 could exhaust memory. This has been fixed.
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150 • "index"/"rindex" were buggy for some combinations of Unicode and
151 non-Unicode data. This has been fixed.
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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.
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157 • Several "pack"/"unpack" bug fixes:
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159 • Checksums with "b" or "B" formats were broken.
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161 • "unpack" checksums could overflow with the "C" format.
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163 • "U0" and "C0" are now scoped to "()" "pack" sub-templates.
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165 • Counted length prefixes now don't change "C0"/"U0" mode.
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167 • "pack" "Z0" used to destroy the preceding character.
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169 • "P"/"p" "pack" formats used to only recognise literal "undef"
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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.
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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.
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179 • "not() || 1" used to segfault. not() now behaves like not(0), which
180 was the pre 5.6.0 behaviour.
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182 • "h2ph" has various enhancements to cope with constructs in header
183 files that used to result in incorrect or invalid output.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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203 "${^UTF8LOCALE}" has been added to give perl space access to
204 "PL_utf8locale".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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/
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235 The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.
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237 The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
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239 The README file for general stuff.
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241 The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
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245perl v5.38.2 2023-11-30 PERL587DELTA(1)