perl588delta(1)

1PERL588DELTA(1)        Perl Programmers Reference Guide        PERL588DELTA(1)
2
3
4

NAME

6       perl588delta - what is new for perl v5.8.8
7

DESCRIPTION

9       This document describes differences between the 5.8.7 release and the
10       5.8.8 release.
11

Incompatible Changes

13       There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.8.7. If any
14       exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.
15

Core Enhancements

17       •   "chdir", "chmod" and "chown" can now work on filehandles as well as
18           filenames, if the system supports respectively "fchdir", "fchmod"
19           and "fchown", thanks to a patch provided by Gisle Aas.
20

Modules and Pragmata

22       •   "Attribute::Handlers" upgraded to version 0.78_02
23
24           •   Documentation typo fix
25
26       •   "attrs" upgraded to version 1.02
27
28           •   Internal cleanup only
29
30       •   "autouse" upgraded to version 1.05
31
32           •   Simplified implementation
33
34       •   "B" upgraded to version 1.09_01
35
36           •   The inheritance hierarchy of the "B::" modules has been
37               corrected; "B::NV" now inherits from "B::SV" (instead of
38               "B::IV").
39
40       •   "blib" upgraded to version 1.03
41
42           •   Documentation typo fix
43
44       •   "ByteLoader" upgraded to version 0.06
45
46           •   Internal cleanup
47
48       •   "CGI" upgraded to version 3.15
49
50           •   Extraneous "?" from self_url() removed
51
52           •   scrolling_list() select attribute fixed
53
54           •   "virtual_port" now works properly with the https protocol
55
56           •   upload_hook() and append() now works in function-oriented mode
57
58           •   "POST_MAX" doesn't cause the client to hang any more
59
60           •   Automatic tab indexes are now disabled and new "-tabindex"
61               pragma has been added to turn automatic indexes back on
62
63           •   end_form() doesn't emit empty (and non-validating) "<div>"
64
65           •   "CGI::Carp" works better in certain mod_perl configurations
66
67           •   Setting $CGI::TMPDIRECTORY is now effective
68
69           •   Enhanced documentation
70
71       •   "charnames" upgraded to version 1.05
72
73           •   viacode() now accept hex strings and has been optimized.
74
75       •   "CPAN" upgraded to version 1.76_02
76
77           •   1 minor bug fix for Win32
78
79       •   "Cwd" upgraded to version 3.12
80
81           •   canonpath() on Win32 now collapses foo\.. sections correctly.
82
83           •   Improved behaviour on Symbian OS.
84
85           •   Enhanced documentation and typo fixes
86
87           •   Internal cleanup
88
89       •   "Data::Dumper" upgraded to version 2.121_08
90
91           •   A problem where "Data::Dumper" would sometimes update the
92               iterator state of hashes has been fixed
93
94           •   Numeric labels now work
95
96           •   Internal cleanup
97
98       •   "DB" upgraded to version 1.01
99
100           •   A problem where the state of the regexp engine would sometimes
101               get clobbered when running under the debugger has been fixed.
102
103       •   "DB_File" upgraded to version 1.814
104
105           •   Adds support for Berkeley DB 4.4.
106
107       •   "Devel::DProf" upgraded to version 20050603.00
108
109           •   Internal cleanup
110
111       •   "Devel::Peek" upgraded to version 1.03
112
113           •   Internal cleanup
114
115       •   "Devel::PPPort" upgraded to version 3.06_01
116
117           •   "--compat-version" argument checking has been improved
118
119           •   Files passed on the command line are filtered by default
120
121           •   "--nofilter" option to override the filtering has been added
122
123           •   Enhanced documentation
124
125       •   "diagnostics" upgraded to version 1.15
126
127           •   Documentation typo fix
128
129       •   "Digest" upgraded to version 1.14
130
131           •   The constructor now knows which module implements SHA-224
132
133           •   Documentation tweaks and typo fixes
134
135       •   "Digest::MD5" upgraded to version 2.36
136
137           •   "XSLoader" is now used for faster loading
138
139           •   Enhanced documentation including MD5 weaknesses discovered
140               lately
141
142       •   "Dumpvalue" upgraded to version 1.12
143
144           •   Documentation fix
145
146       •   "DynaLoader" upgraded but unfortunately we're not able to increment
147           its version number :-(
148
149           •   Implements "dl_unload_file" on Win32
150
151           •   Internal cleanup
152
153           •   "XSLoader" 0.06 incorporated; small optimisation for calling
154               bootstrap_inherit() and documentation enhancements.
155
156       •   "Encode" upgraded to version 2.12
157
158           •   A coderef is now acceptable for "CHECK"!
159
160           •   3 new characters added to the ISO-8859-7 encoding
161
162           •   New encoding "MIME-Header-ISO_2022_JP" added
163
164           •   Problem with partial characters and encoding(utf-8-strict)
165               fixed.
166
167           •   Documentation enhancements and typo fixes
168
169       •   "English" upgraded to version 1.02
170
171           •   the $COMPILING variable has been added
172
173       •   "ExtUtils::Constant" upgraded to version 0.17
174
175           •   Improved compatibility with older versions of perl
176
177       •   "ExtUtils::MakeMaker" upgraded to version 6.30 (was 6.17)
178
179           •   Too much to list here;  see
180               <http://search.cpan.org/dist/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/Changes>
181
182       •   "File::Basename" upgraded to version 2.74, with changes contributed
183           by Michael Schwern.
184
185           •   Documentation clarified and errors corrected.
186
187           •   "basename" now strips trailing path separators before
188               processing the name.
189
190           •   "basename" now returns "/" for parameter "/", to make
191               "basename" consistent with the shell utility of the same name.
192
193           •   The suffix is no longer stripped if it is identical to the
194               remaining characters in the name, again for consistency with
195               the shell utility.
196
197           •   Some internal code cleanup.
198
199       •   "File::Copy" upgraded to version 2.09
200
201           •   Copying a file onto itself used to fail.
202
203           •   Moving a file between file systems now preserves the access and
204               modification time stamps
205
206       •   "File::Find" upgraded to version 1.10
207
208           •   Win32 portability fixes
209
210           •   Enhanced documentation
211
212       •   "File::Glob" upgraded to version 1.05
213
214           •   Internal cleanup
215
216       •   "File::Path" upgraded to version 1.08
217
218           •   "mkpath" now preserves "errno" when "mkdir" fails
219
220       •   "File::Spec" upgraded to version 3.12
221
222           •   "File::Spec->rootdir()" now returns "\" on Win32, instead of
223               "/"
224
225           •   $^O could sometimes become tainted. This has been fixed.
226
227           •   "canonpath" on Win32 now collapses "foo/.." (or "foo\..")
228               sections correctly, rather than doing the "misguided" work it
229               was previously doing.  Note that "canonpath" on Unix still does
230               not collapse these sections, as doing so would be incorrect.
231
232           •   Some documentation improvements
233
234           •   Some internal code cleanup
235
236       •   "FileCache" upgraded to version 1.06
237
238           •   POD formatting errors in the documentation fixed
239
240       •   "Filter::Simple" upgraded to version 0.82
241
242       •   "FindBin" upgraded to version 1.47
243
244           •   Now works better with directories where access rights are more
245               restrictive than usual.
246
247       •   "GDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.08
248
249           •   Internal cleanup
250
251       •   "Getopt::Long" upgraded to version 2.35
252
253           •   "prefix_pattern" has now been complemented by a new
254               configuration option "long_prefix_pattern" that allows the user
255               to specify what prefix patterns should have long option style
256               semantics applied.
257
258           •   Options can now take multiple values at once (experimental)
259
260           •   Various bug fixes
261
262       •   "if" upgraded to version 0.05
263
264           •   Give more meaningful error messages from "if" when invoked with
265               a condition in list context.
266
267           •   Restore backwards compatibility with earlier versions of perl
268
269       •   "IO" upgraded to version 1.22
270
271           •   Enhanced documentation
272
273           •   Internal cleanup
274
275       •   "IPC::Open2" upgraded to version 1.02
276
277           •   Enhanced documentation
278
279       •   "IPC::Open3" upgraded to version 1.02
280
281           •   Enhanced documentation
282
283       •   "List::Util" upgraded to version 1.18 (was 1.14)
284
285           •   Fix pure-perl version of "refaddr" to avoid blessing an un-
286               blessed reference
287
288           •   Use "XSLoader" for faster loading
289
290           •   Fixed various memory leaks
291
292           •   Internal cleanup and portability fixes
293
294       •   "Math::Complex" upgraded to version 1.35
295
296           •   "atan2(0, i)" now works, as do all the (computable) complex
297               argument cases
298
299           •   Fixes for certain bugs in "make" and "emake"
300
301           •   Support returning the kth root directly
302
303           •   Support "[2,-3pi/8]" in "emake"
304
305           •   Support "inf" for "make"/"emake"
306
307           •   Document "make"/"emake" more visibly
308
309       •   "Math::Trig" upgraded to version 1.03
310
311           •   Add more great circle routines: "great_circle_waypoint" and
312               "great_circle_destination"
313
314       •   "MIME::Base64" upgraded to version 3.07
315
316           •   Use "XSLoader" for faster loading
317
318           •   Enhanced documentation
319
320           •   Internal cleanup
321
322       •   "NDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.06
323
324           •   Enhanced documentation
325
326       •   "ODBM_File" upgraded to version 1.06
327
328           •   Documentation typo fixed
329
330           •   Internal cleanup
331
332       •   "Opcode" upgraded to version 1.06
333
334           •   Enhanced documentation
335
336           •   Internal cleanup
337
338       •   "open" upgraded to version 1.05
339
340           •   Enhanced documentation
341
342       •   "overload" upgraded to version 1.04
343
344           •   Enhanced documentation
345
346       •   "PerlIO" upgraded to version 1.04
347
348           •   "PerlIO::via" iterate over layers properly now
349
350           •   "PerlIO::scalar" understands "$/ = """ now
351
352           •   encoding(utf-8-strict) with partial characters now works
353
354           •   Enhanced documentation
355
356           •   Internal cleanup
357
358       •   "Pod::Functions" upgraded to version 1.03
359
360           •   Documentation typos fixed
361
362       •   "Pod::Html" upgraded to version 1.0504
363
364           •   HTML output will now correctly link to "=item"s on the same
365               page, and should be valid XHTML.
366
367           •   Variable names are recognized as intended
368
369           •   Documentation typos fixed
370
371       •   "Pod::Parser" upgraded to version 1.32
372
373           •   Allow files that start with "=head" on the first line
374
375           •   Win32 portability fix
376
377           •   Exit status of "pod2usage" fixed
378
379           •   New "-noperldoc" switch for "pod2usage"
380
381           •   Arbitrary URL schemes now allowed
382
383           •   Documentation typos fixed
384
385       •   "POSIX" upgraded to version 1.09
386
387           •   Documentation typos fixed
388
389           •   Internal cleanup
390
391       •   "re" upgraded to version 0.05
392
393           •   Documentation typo fixed
394
395       •   "Safe" upgraded to version 2.12
396
397           •   Minor documentation enhancement
398
399       •   "SDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.05
400
401           •   Documentation typo fixed
402
403           •   Internal cleanup
404
405       •   "Socket" upgraded to version 1.78
406
407           •   Internal cleanup
408
409       •   "Storable" upgraded to version 2.15
410
411           •   This includes the "STORABLE_attach" hook functionality added by
412               Adam Kennedy, and more frugal memory requirements when storing
413               under "ithreads", by using the "ithreads" cloning tracking
414               code.
415
416       •   "Switch" upgraded to version 2.10_01
417
418           •   Documentation typos fixed
419
420       •   "Sys::Syslog" upgraded to version 0.13
421
422           •   Now provides numeric macros and meaningful "Exporter" tags.
423
424           •   No longer uses "Sys::Hostname" as it may provide useless values
425               in unconfigured network environments, so instead uses
426               "INADDR_LOOPBACK" directly.
427
428           •   syslog() now uses local timestamp.
429
430           •   setlogmask() now behaves like its C counterpart.
431
432           •   setlogsock() will now croak() as documented.
433
434           •   Improved error and warnings messages.
435
436           •   Improved documentation.
437
438       •   "Term::ANSIColor" upgraded to version 1.10
439
440           •   Fixes a bug in "colored" when $EACHLINE is set that caused it
441               to not color lines consisting solely of 0 (literal zero).
442
443           •   Improved tests.
444
445       •   "Term::ReadLine" upgraded to version 1.02
446
447           •   Documentation tweaks
448
449       •   "Test::Harness" upgraded to version 2.56 (was 2.48)
450
451           •   The "Test::Harness" timer is now off by default.
452
453           •   Now shows elapsed time in milliseconds.
454
455           •   Various bug fixes
456
457       •   "Test::Simple" upgraded to version 0.62 (was 0.54)
458
459           •   is_deeply() no longer fails to work for many cases
460
461           •   Various minor bug fixes
462
463           •   Documentation enhancements
464
465       •   "Text::Tabs" upgraded to version 2005.0824
466
467           •   Provides a faster implementation of "expand"
468
469       •   "Text::Wrap" upgraded to version 2005.082401
470
471           •   Adds $Text::Wrap::separator2, which allows you to preserve
472               existing newlines but add line-breaks with some other string.
473
474       •   "threads" upgraded to version 1.07
475
476           •   "threads" will now honour "no warnings 'threads'"
477
478           •   A thread's interpreter is now freed after "$t->join()" rather
479               than after "undef $t", which should fix some "ithreads" memory
480               leaks. (Fixed by Dave Mitchell)
481
482           •   Some documentation typo fixes.
483
484       •   "threads::shared" upgraded to version 0.94
485
486           •   Documentation changes only
487
488           •   Note: An improved implementation of "threads::shared" is
489               available on CPAN - this will be merged into 5.8.9 if it proves
490               stable.
491
492       •   "Tie::Hash" upgraded to version 1.02
493
494           •   Documentation typo fixed
495
496       •   "Time::HiRes" upgraded to version 1.86 (was 1.66)
497
498           •   clock_nanosleep() and clock() functions added
499
500           •   Support for the POSIX clock_gettime() and clock_getres() has
501               been added
502
503           •   Return "undef" or an empty list if the C gettimeofday()
504               function fails
505
506           •   Improved "nanosleep" detection
507
508           •   Internal cleanup
509
510           •   Enhanced documentation
511
512       •   "Unicode::Collate" upgraded to version 0.52
513
514           •   Now implements UCA Revision 14 (based on Unicode 4.1.0).
515
516           •   "Unicode::Collate->new" method no longer overwrites user's $_
517
518           •   Enhanced documentation
519
520       •   "Unicode::UCD" upgraded to version 0.24
521
522           •   Documentation typos fixed
523
524       •   "User::grent" upgraded to version 1.01
525
526           •   Documentation typo fixed
527
528       •   "utf8" upgraded to version 1.06
529
530           •   Documentation typos fixed
531
532       •   "vmsish" upgraded to version 1.02
533
534           •   Documentation typos fixed
535
536       •   "warnings" upgraded to version 1.05
537
538           •   Gentler messing with "Carp::" internals
539
540           •   Internal cleanup
541
542           •   Documentation update
543
544       •   "Win32" upgraded to version 0.2601
545
546           •   Provides Windows Vista support to "Win32::GetOSName"
547
548           •   Documentation enhancements
549
550       •   "XS::Typemap" upgraded to version 0.02
551
552           •   Internal cleanup
553

Utility Changes

555   "h2xs" enhancements
556       "h2xs" implements new option "--use-xsloader" to force use of
557       "XSLoader" even in backwards compatible modules.
558
559       The handling of authors' names that had apostrophes has been fixed.
560
561       Any enums with negative values are now skipped.
562
563   "perlivp" enhancements
564       "perlivp" implements new option "-a" and will not check for *.ph files
565       by default any more.  Use the "-a" option to run all tests.
566

New Documentation

568       The perlglossary manpage is a glossary of terms used in the Perl
569       documentation, technical and otherwise, kindly provided by O'Reilly
570       Media, inc.
571

Performance Enhancements

573       •   Weak reference creation is now O(1) rather than O(n), courtesy of
574           Nicholas Clark. Weak reference deletion remains O(n), but if
575           deletion only happens at program exit, it may be skipped
576           completely.
577
578       •   Salvador FandiÃ±o provided improvements to reduce the memory usage
579           of "sort" and to speed up some cases.
580
581       •   Jarkko Hietaniemi and Andy Lester worked to mark as much data as
582           possible in the C source files as "static", to increase the
583           proportion of the executable file that the operating system can
584           share between process, and thus reduce real memory usage on multi-
585           user systems.
586

Installation and Configuration Improvements

588       Parallel makes should work properly now, although there may still be
589       problems if "make test" is instructed to run in parallel.
590
591       Building with Borland's compilers on Win32 should work more smoothly.
592       In particular Steve Hay has worked to side step many warnings emitted
593       by their compilers and at least one C compiler internal error.
594
595       "Configure" will now detect "clearenv" and "unsetenv", thanks to a
596       patch from Alan Burlison. It will also probe for "futimes" and whether
597       "sprintf" correctly returns the length of the formatted string, which
598       will both be used in perl 5.8.9.
599
600       There are improved hints for next-3.0, vmesa, IX, Darwin, Solaris,
601       Linux, DEC/OSF, HP-UX and MPE/iX
602
603       Perl extensions on Windows now can be statically built into the Perl
604       DLL, thanks to a work by Vadim Konovalov. (This improvement was
605       actually in 5.8.7, but was accidentally omitted from perl587delta).
606

Selected Bug Fixes

608   no warnings 'category' works correctly with -w
609       Previously when running with warnings enabled globally via "-w",
610       selective disabling of specific warning categories would actually turn
611       off all warnings.  This is now fixed; now "no warnings 'io';" will only
612       turn off warnings in the "io" class. Previously it would erroneously
613       turn off all warnings.
614
615       This bug fix may cause some programs to start correctly issuing
616       warnings.
617
618   Remove over-optimisation
619       Perl 5.8.4 introduced a change so that assignments of "undef" to a
620       scalar, or of an empty list to an array or a hash, were optimised away.
621       As this could cause problems when "goto" jumps were involved, this
622       change has been backed out.
623
624   sprintf() fixes
625       Using the sprintf() function with some formats could lead to a buffer
626       overflow in some specific cases. This has been fixed, along with
627       several other bugs, notably in bounds checking.
628
629       In related fixes, it was possible for badly written code that did not
630       follow the documentation of "Sys::Syslog" to have formatting
631       vulnerabilities.  "Sys::Syslog" has been changed to protect people from
632       poor quality third party code.
633
634   Debugger and Unicode slowdown
635       It had been reported that running under perl's debugger when processing
636       Unicode data could cause unexpectedly large slowdowns. The most likely
637       cause of this was identified and fixed by Nicholas Clark.
638
639   Smaller fixes
640       •   "FindBin" now works better with directories where access rights are
641           more restrictive than usual.
642
643       •   Several memory leaks in ithreads were closed. An improved
644           implementation of "threads::shared" is available on CPAN - this
645           will be merged into 5.8.9 if it proves stable.
646
647       •   Trailing spaces are now trimmed from $! and $^E.
648
649       •   Operations that require perl to read a process's list of groups,
650           such as reads of $( and $), now dynamically allocate memory rather
651           than using a fixed sized array. The fixed size array could cause C
652           stack exhaustion on systems configured to use large numbers of
653           groups.
654
655       •   "PerlIO::scalar" now works better with non-default $/ settings.
656
657       •   You can now use the "x" operator to repeat a "qw//" list. This used
658           to raise a syntax error.
659
660       •   The debugger now traces correctly execution in eval("")uated code
661           that contains #line directives.
662
663       •   The value of the "open" pragma is no longer ignored for three-
664           argument opens.
665
666       •   The optimisation of "for (reverse @a)" introduced in perl 5.8.6
667           could misbehave when the array had undefined elements and was used
668           in LVALUE context. Dave Mitchell provided a fix.
669
670       •   Some case insensitive matches between UTF-8 encoded data and 8 bit
671           regexps, and vice versa, could give malformed character warnings.
672           These have been fixed by Dave Mitchell and Yves Orton.
673
674       •   "lcfirst" and "ucfirst" could corrupt the string for certain cases
675           where the length UTF-8 encoding of the string in lower case, upper
676           case or title case differed. This was fixed by Nicholas Clark.
677
678       •   Perl will now use the C library calls "unsetenv" and "clearenv" if
679           present to delete keys from %ENV and delete %ENV entirely, thanks
680           to a patch from Alan Burlison.
681

New or Changed Diagnostics

683   Attempt to set length of freed array
684       This is a new warning, produced in situations such as this:
685
686           $r = do {my @a; \$#a};
687           $$r = 503;
688
689   Non-string passed as bitmask
690       This is a new warning, produced when number has been passed as an
691       argument to select(), instead of a bitmask.
692
693           # Wrong, will now warn
694           $rin = fileno(STDIN);
695           ($nfound,$timeleft) = select($rout=$rin, undef, undef, $timeout);
696
697           # Should be
698           $rin = '';
699           vec($rin,fileno(STDIN),1) = 1;
700           ($nfound,$timeleft) = select($rout=$rin, undef, undef, $timeout);
701
702   Search pattern not terminated or ternary operator parsed as search pattern
703       This syntax error indicates that the lexer couldn't find the final
704       delimiter of a "?PATTERN?" construct. Mentioning the ternary operator
705       in this error message makes it easier to diagnose syntax errors.
706

Changed Internals

708       There has been a fair amount of refactoring of the "C" source code,
709       partly to make it tidier and more maintainable. The resulting object
710       code and the "perl" binary may well be smaller than 5.8.7, in
711       particular due to a change contributed by Dave Mitchell which reworked
712       the warnings code to be significantly smaller. Apart from being smaller
713       and possibly faster, there should be no user-detectable changes.
714
715       Andy Lester supplied many improvements to determine which function
716       parameters and local variables could actually be declared "const" to
717       the C compiler. Steve Peters provided new *_set macros and reworked the
718       core to use these rather than assigning to macros in LVALUE context.
719
720       Dave Mitchell improved the lexer debugging output under "-DT"
721
722       Nicholas Clark changed the string buffer allocation so that it is now
723       rounded up to the next multiple of 4 (or 8 on platforms with 64 bit
724       pointers). This should reduce the number of calls to "realloc" without
725       actually using any extra memory.
726
727       The "HV"'s array of "HE*"s is now allocated at the correct (minimal)
728       size, thanks to another change by Nicholas Clark. Compile with
729       "-DPERL_USE_LARGE_HV_ALLOC" to use the old, sloppier, default.
730
731       For XS or embedding debugging purposes, if perl is compiled with
732       "-DDEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS_FORK_DUMP" in addition to
733       "-DDEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS" then a child process is "fork"ed just before
734       global destruction, which is used to display the values of any scalars
735       found to have leaked at the end of global destruction. Without this,
736       the scalars have already been freed sufficiently at the point of
737       detection that it is impossible to produce any meaningful dump of their
738       contents.  This feature was implemented by the indefatigable Nicholas
739       Clark, based on an idea by Mike Giroux.
740

Platform Specific Problems

742       The optimiser on HP-UX 11.23 (Itanium 2) is currently partly disabled
743       (scaled down to +O1) when using HP C-ANSI-C; the cause of problems at
744       higher optimisation levels is still unclear.
745
746       There are a handful of remaining test failures on VMS, mostly due to
747       test fixes and minor module tweaks with too many dependencies to
748       integrate into this release from the development stream, where they
749       have all been corrected.  The following is a list of expected failures
750       with the patch number of the fix where that is known:
751
752           ext/Devel/PPPort/t/ppphtest.t  #26913
753           ext/List/Util/t/p_tainted.t    #26912
754           lib/ExtUtils/t/PL_FILES.t      #26813
755           lib/ExtUtils/t/basic.t         #26813
756           t/io/fs.t
757           t/op/cmp.t
758

Reporting Bugs

760       If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
761       recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
762       database at http://bugs.perl.org.  There may also be information at
763       http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page.
764
765       If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
766       program included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a
767       tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output
768       of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
769       the Perl porting team.  You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at
770       http://bugs.perl.org/
771