NAME¶
perl587delta - what is new for perl v5.8.7
DESCRIPTION¶
This document describes differences between the 5.8.6 release and the 5.8.7
release.
Incompatible Changes¶
There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.6.
Core Enhancements¶
Unicode Character Database 4.1.0¶
The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has been updated
to 4.1.0 from 4.0.1. See
<
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.1.0/#NotableChanges> for the
notable changes.
suidperl less insecure¶
A pair of exploits in "suidperl" involving debugging code have been
closed.
For new projects the core perl team strongly recommends that you use dedicated,
single purpose security tools such as "sudo" in preference to
"suidperl".
Optional site customization script¶
The perl interpreter can be built to allow the use of a site customization
script. By default this is not enabled, to be consistent with previous perl
releases. To use this, add "-Dusesitecustomize" to the command line
flags when running the "Configure" script. See also "-f"
in perlrun.
"Config.pm" is now much smaller.¶
"Config.pm" is now about 3K rather than 32K, with the infrequently
used code and %Config values loaded on demand. This is transparent to the
programmer, but means that most code will save parsing and loading 29K of
script (for example, code that uses "File::Find").
Modules and Pragmata¶
- •
- B upgraded to version 1.09
- •
- base upgraded to version 2.07
- •
- bignum upgraded to version 0.17
- •
- bytes upgraded to version 1.02
- •
- Carp upgraded to version 1.04
- •
- CGI upgraded to version 3.10
- •
- Class::ISA upgraded to version 0.33
- •
- Data::Dumper upgraded to version 2.121_02
- •
- DB_File upgraded to version 1.811
- •
- Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.06
- •
- Digest upgraded to version 1.10
- •
- Encode upgraded to version 2.10
- •
- FileCache upgraded to version 1.05
- •
- File::Path upgraded to version 1.07
- •
- File::Temp upgraded to version 0.16
- •
- IO::File upgraded to version 1.11
- •
- IO::Socket upgraded to version 1.28
- •
- Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.77
- •
- Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.15
- •
- overload upgraded to version 1.03
- •
- PathTools upgraded to version 3.05
- •
- Pod::HTML upgraded to version 1.0503
- •
- Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.14
- •
- Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.58
- •
- Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.30
- •
- Symbol upgraded to version 1.06
- •
- Term::ANSIColor upgraded to version 1.09
- •
- Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.48
- •
- Test::Simple upgraded to version 0.54
- •
- Text::Wrap upgraded to version 2001.09293, to fix a bug
when wrap() was called with a non-space separator.
- •
- threads::shared upgraded to version 0.93
- •
- Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.66
- •
- Time::Local upgraded to version 1.11
- •
- Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.32
- •
- utf8 upgraded to version 1.05
- •
- Win32 upgraded to version 0.24, which provides
Win32::GetFileVersion
Utility Changes¶
find2perl enhancements¶
"find2perl" has new options "-iname", "-path" and
"-ipath".
The internal pointer mapping hash used during ithreads cloning now uses an arena
for memory allocation. In tests this reduced ithreads cloning time by about
10%.
Installation and Configuration Improvements¶
- •
- The Win32 "dmake" makefile.mk has been updated to
make it compatible with the latest versions of dmake.
- •
- "PERL_MALLOC", "DEBUG_MSTATS",
"PERL_HASH_SEED_EXPLICIT" and "NO_HASH_SEED" should
now work in Win32 makefiles.
Selected Bug Fixes¶
- •
- The socket() function on Win32 has been fixed so
that it is able to use transport providers which specify a protocol of 0
(meaning any protocol is allowed) once more. (This was broken in 5.8.6,
and typically caused the use of ICMP sockets to fail.)
- •
- Another obscure bug involving "substr" and UTF-8
caused by bad internal offset caching has been identified and fixed.
- •
- A bug involving the loading of UTF-8 tables by the regexp
engine has been fixed - code such as ""\x{100}" =~
/[[:print:]]/" will no longer give corrupt results.
- •
- Case conversion operations such as "uc" on a long
Unicode string could exhaust memory. This has been fixed.
- •
- "index"/"rindex" were buggy for some
combinations of Unicode and non-Unicode data. This has been fixed.
- •
- "read" (and presumably "sysread") would
expose the UTF-8 internals when reading from a byte oriented file handle
into a UTF-8 scalar. This has been fixed.
- •
- Several "pack"/"unpack" bug fixes:
- •
- Checksums with "b" or "B" formats were
broken.
- •
- "unpack" checksums could overflow with the
"C" format.
- •
- "U0" and "C0" are now scoped to
"()" "pack" sub-templates.
- •
- Counted length prefixes now don't change
"C0"/"U0" mode.
- •
- "pack" "Z0" used to destroy the
preceding character.
- •
- "P"/"p" "pack" formats used
to only recognise literal "undef"
- •
- Using closures with ithreads could cause perl to crash.
This was due to failure to correctly lock internal OP structures, and has
been fixed.
- •
- The return value of "close" now correctly
reflects any file errors that occur while flushing the handle's data,
instead of just giving failure if the actual underlying file close
operation failed.
- •
- "not() || 1" used to segfault. "not()"
now behaves like not(0), which was the pre 5.6.0 behaviour.
- •
- "h2ph" has various enhancements to cope with
constructs in header files that used to result in incorrect or invalid
output.
New or Changed Diagnostics¶
There is a new taint error, "%ENV is aliased to %s". This error is
thrown when taint checks are enabled and when *ENV has been aliased, so that
%ENV has no env-magic anymore and hence the environment cannot be verified as
taint-free.
The internals of "pack" and "unpack" have been updated. All
legitimate templates should work as before, but there may be some changes in
the error reported for complex failure cases. Any behaviour changes for
non-error cases are bugs, and should be reported.
Changed Internals¶
There has been a fair amount of refactoring of the "C" source code,
partly to make it tidier and more maintainable. The resulting object code and
the "perl" binary may well be smaller than 5.8.6, and hopefully
faster in some cases, but apart from this there should be no user-detectable
changes.
"${^UTF8LOCALE}" has been added to give perl space access to
"PL_utf8locale".
The size of the arenas used to allocate SV heads and most SV bodies can now be
changed at compile time. The old size was 1008 bytes, the new default size is
4080 bytes.
Known Problems¶
Unicode strings returned from overloaded operators can be buggy. This is a long
standing bug reported since 5.8.6 was released, but we do not yet have a
suitable fix for it.
On UNICOS, lib/Math/BigInt/t/bigintc.t hangs burning CPU. ext/B/t/bytecode.t and
ext/Socket/t/socketpair.t both fail tests. These are unlikely to be resolved,
as our valiant UNICOS porter's last Cray is being decommissioned.
Reporting Bugs¶
If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently
posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at
http://bugs.perl.org. There may also be information at
http://www.perl.org,
the Perl Home Page.
If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the
perlbug program
included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but
sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output of "perl
-V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl
porting team. You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at
http://bugs.perl.org/
SEE ALSO¶
The
Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.
The
INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
The
README file for general stuff.
The
Artistic and
Copying files for copyright information.