perl588delta - what is new for perl v5.8.8
This document describes differences between the 5.8.7 release and the 5.8.8 release.
There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.8.7. If any exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.
chdir, chmod and chown can now work on filehandles as well as filenames, if the system supports respectively fchdir, fchmod and fchown, thanks to a patch provided by Gisle Aas.
chdir
chmod
chown
fchdir
fchmod
fchown
Attribute::Handlers upgraded to version 0.78_02
Attribute::Handlers
Documentation typo fix
attrs upgraded to version 1.02
attrs
Internal cleanup only
autouse upgraded to version 1.05
autouse
Simplified implementation
B upgraded to version 1.09_01
B
The inheritance hierarchy of the B:: modules has been corrected; B::NV now inherits from B::SV (instead of B::IV).
B::
B::NV
B::SV
B::IV
blib upgraded to version 1.03
blib
ByteLoader upgraded to version 0.06
ByteLoader
Internal cleanup
CGI upgraded to version 3.15
CGI
Extraneous "?" from self_url() removed
self_url()
scrolling_list() select attribute fixed
scrolling_list()
virtual_port now works properly with the https protocol
virtual_port
upload_hook() and append() now works in function-oriented mode
upload_hook()
append()
POST_MAX doesn't cause the client to hang any more
POST_MAX
Automatic tab indexes are now disabled and new -tabindex pragma has been added to turn automatic indexes back on
-tabindex
end_form() doesn't emit empty (and non-validating) <div>
end_form()
<div>
CGI::Carp works better in certain mod_perl configurations
CGI::Carp
Setting $CGI::TMPDIRECTORY is now effective
$CGI::TMPDIRECTORY
Enhanced documentation
charnames upgraded to version 1.05
charnames
viacode() now accept hex strings and has been optimized.
viacode()
CPAN upgraded to version 1.76_02
CPAN
1 minor bug fix for Win32
Cwd upgraded to version 3.12
Cwd
canonpath() on Win32 now collapses foo\.. sections correctly.
canonpath()
Improved behaviour on Symbian OS.
Enhanced documentation and typo fixes
Data::Dumper upgraded to version 2.121_08
Data::Dumper
A problem where Data::Dumper would sometimes update the iterator state of hashes has been fixed
Numeric labels now work
DB upgraded to version 1.01
DB
A problem where the state of the regexp engine would sometimes get clobbered when running under the debugger has been fixed.
DB_File upgraded to version 1.814
DB_File
Adds support for Berkeley DB 4.4.
Devel::DProf upgraded to version 20050603.00
Devel::DProf
Devel::Peek upgraded to version 1.03
Devel::Peek
Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.06_01
Devel::PPPort
--compat-version argument checking has been improved
--compat-version
Files passed on the command line are filtered by default
--nofilter option to override the filtering has been added
--nofilter
diagnostics upgraded to version 1.15
diagnostics
Digest upgraded to version 1.14
Digest
The constructor now knows which module implements SHA-224
Documentation tweaks and typo fixes
Digest::MD5 upgraded to version 2.36
Digest::MD5
XSLoader is now used for faster loading
XSLoader
Enhanced documentation including MD5 weaknesses discovered lately
Dumpvalue upgraded to version 1.12
Dumpvalue
Documentation fix
DynaLoader upgraded but unfortunately we're not able to increment its version number :-(
DynaLoader
Implements dl_unload_file on Win32
dl_unload_file
XSLoader 0.06 incorporated; small optimisation for calling bootstrap_inherit() and documentation enhancements.
bootstrap_inherit()
Encode upgraded to version 2.12
Encode
A coderef is now acceptable for CHECK!
CHECK
3 new characters added to the ISO-8859-7 encoding
New encoding MIME-Header-ISO_2022_JP added
MIME-Header-ISO_2022_JP
Problem with partial characters and encoding(utf-8-strict) fixed.
encoding(utf-8-strict)
Documentation enhancements and typo fixes
English upgraded to version 1.02
English
the $COMPILING variable has been added
$COMPILING
ExtUtils::Constant upgraded to version 0.17
ExtUtils::Constant
Improved compatibility with older versions of perl
ExtUtils::MakeMaker upgraded to version 6.30 (was 6.17)
ExtUtils::MakeMaker
Too much to list here; see http://search.cpan.org/dist/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/Changes
File::Basename upgraded to version 2.74, with changes contributed by Michael Schwern.
File::Basename
Documentation clarified and errors corrected.
basename now strips trailing path separators before processing the name.
basename
basename now returns / for parameter /, to make basename consistent with the shell utility of the same name.
/
The suffix is no longer stripped if it is identical to the remaining characters in the name, again for consistency with the shell utility.
Some internal code cleanup.
File::Copy upgraded to version 2.09
File::Copy
Copying a file onto itself used to fail.
Moving a file between file systems now preserves the access and modification time stamps
File::Find upgraded to version 1.10
File::Find
Win32 portability fixes
File::Glob upgraded to version 1.05
File::Glob
File::Path upgraded to version 1.08
File::Path
mkpath now preserves errno when mkdir fails
mkpath
errno
mkdir
File::Spec upgraded to version 3.12
File::Spec
File::Spec-rootdir()> now returns \ on Win32, instead of /
File::Spec-
\
$^O could sometimes become tainted. This has been fixed.
$^O
canonpath on Win32 now collapses foo/.. (or foo\..) sections correctly, rather than doing the "misguided" work it was previously doing. Note that canonpath on Unix still does not collapse these sections, as doing so would be incorrect.
canonpath
foo/..
foo\..
Some documentation improvements
Some internal code cleanup
FileCache upgraded to version 1.06
FileCache
POD formatting errors in the documentation fixed
Filter::Simple upgraded to version 0.82
Filter::Simple
FindBin upgraded to version 1.47
FindBin
Now works better with directories where access rights are more restrictive than usual.
GDBM_File upgraded to version 1.08
GDBM_File
Getopt::Long upgraded to version 2.35
Getopt::Long
prefix_pattern has now been complemented by a new configuration option long_prefix_pattern that allows the user to specify what prefix patterns should have long option style semantics applied.
prefix_pattern
long_prefix_pattern
Options can now take multiple values at once (experimental)
Various bug fixes
if upgraded to version 0.05
if
Give more meaningful error messages from if when invoked with a condition in list context.
Restore backwards compatibility with earlier versions of perl
IO upgraded to version 1.22
IO
IPC::Open2 upgraded to version 1.02
IPC::Open2
IPC::Open3 upgraded to version 1.02
IPC::Open3
List::Util upgraded to version 1.18 (was 1.14)
List::Util
Fix pure-perl version of refaddr to avoid blessing an un-blessed reference
refaddr
Use XSLoader for faster loading
Fixed various memory leaks
Internal cleanup and portability fixes
Math::Complex upgraded to version 1.35
Math::Complex
atan2(0, i) now works, as do all the (computable) complex argument cases
atan2(0, i)
Fixes for certain bugs in make and emake
make
emake
Support returning the kth root directly
Support [2,-3pi/8] in emake
[2,-3pi/8]
Support inf for make/emake
inf
Document make/emake more visibly
Math::Trig upgraded to version 1.03
Math::Trig
Add more great circle routines: great_circle_waypoint and great_circle_destination
great_circle_waypoint
great_circle_destination
MIME::Base64 upgraded to version 3.07
MIME::Base64
NDBM_File upgraded to version 1.06
NDBM_File
ODBM_File upgraded to version 1.06
ODBM_File
Documentation typo fixed
Opcode upgraded to version 1.06
Opcode
open upgraded to version 1.05
open
overload upgraded to version 1.04
overload
PerlIO upgraded to version 1.04
PerlIO
PerlIO::via iterate over layers properly now
PerlIO::via
PerlIO::scalar understands $/ = "" now
PerlIO::scalar
$/ = ""
encoding(utf-8-strict) with partial characters now works
Pod::Functions upgraded to version 1.03
Pod::Functions
Documentation typos fixed
Pod::Html upgraded to version 1.0504
Pod::Html
HTML output will now correctly link to =items on the same page, and should be valid XHTML.
=item
Variable names are recognized as intended
Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.32
Pod::Parser
Allow files that start with =head on the first line
=head
Win32 portability fix
Exit status of pod2usage fixed
pod2usage
New -noperldoc switch for pod2usage
-noperldoc
Arbitrary URL schemes now allowed
POSIX upgraded to version 1.09
POSIX
re upgraded to version 0.05
re
Safe upgraded to version 2.12
Safe
Minor documentation enhancement
SDBM_File upgraded to version 1.05
SDBM_File
Socket upgraded to version 1.78
Socket
Storable upgraded to version 2.15
Storable
This includes the STORABLE_attach hook functionality added by Adam Kennedy, and more frugal memory requirements when storing under ithreads, by using the ithreads cloning tracking code.
STORABLE_attach
ithreads
Switch upgraded to version 2.10_01
Switch
Sys::Syslog upgraded to version 0.13
Sys::Syslog
Now provides numeric macros and meaningful Exporter tags.
Exporter
No longer uses Sys::Hostname as it may provide useless values in unconfigured network environments, so instead uses INADDR_LOOPBACK directly.
Sys::Hostname
INADDR_LOOPBACK
syslog() now uses local timestamp.
syslog()
setlogmask() now behaves like its C counterpart.
setlogmask()
setlogsock() will now croak() as documented.
setlogsock()
croak()
Improved error and warnings messages.
Improved documentation.
Term::ANSIColor upgraded to version 1.10
Term::ANSIColor
Fixes a bug in colored when $EACHLINE is set that caused it to not color lines consisting solely of 0 (literal zero).
colored
$EACHLINE
Improved tests.
Term::ReadLine upgraded to version 1.02
Term::ReadLine
Documentation tweaks
Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.56 (was 2.48)
Test::Harness
The Test::Harness timer is now off by default.
Now shows elapsed time in milliseconds.
Test::Simple upgraded to version 0.62 (was 0.54)
Test::Simple
is_deeply() no longer fails to work for many cases
is_deeply()
Various minor bug fixes
Documentation enhancements
Text::Tabs upgraded to version 2005.0824
Text::Tabs
Provides a faster implementation of expand
expand
Text::Wrap upgraded to version 2005.082401
Text::Wrap
Adds $Text::Wrap::separator2, which allows you to preserve existing newlines but add line-breaks with some other string.
$Text::Wrap::separator2
threads upgraded to version 1.07
threads
threads will now honour no warnings 'threads'
no warnings 'threads'
A thread's interpreter is now freed after $t->join() rather than after undef $t, which should fix some ithreads memory leaks. (Fixed by Dave Mitchell)
$t->join()
undef $t
Some documentation typo fixes.
threads::shared upgraded to version 0.94
threads::shared
Documentation changes only
Note: An improved implementation of threads::shared is available on CPAN - this will be merged into 5.8.9 if it proves stable.
Tie::Hash upgraded to version 1.02
Tie::Hash
Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.86 (was 1.66)
Time::HiRes
clock_nanosleep() and clock() functions added
clock_nanosleep()
clock()
Support for the POSIX clock_gettime() and clock_getres() has been added
clock_gettime()
clock_getres()
Return undef or an empty list if the C gettimeofday() function fails
undef
gettimeofday()
Improved nanosleep detection
nanosleep
Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.52
Unicode::Collate
Now implements UCA Revision 14 (based on Unicode 4.1.0).
Unicode::Collate-new> method no longer overwrites user's $_
Unicode::Collate-
$_
Unicode::UCD upgraded to version 0.24
Unicode::UCD
User::grent upgraded to version 1.01
User::grent
utf8 upgraded to version 1.06
utf8
vmsish upgraded to version 1.02
vmsish
warnings upgraded to version 1.05
warnings
Gentler messing with Carp:: internals
Carp::
Documentation update
Win32 upgraded to version 0.2601
Win32
Provides Windows Vista support to Win32::GetOSName
Win32::GetOSName
XS::Typemap upgraded to version 0.02
XS::Typemap
h2xs
h2xs implements new option --use-xsloader to force use of XSLoader even in backwards compatible modules.
--use-xsloader
The handling of authors' names that had apostrophes has been fixed.
Any enums with negative values are now skipped.
perlivp
perlivp implements new option -a and will not check for *.ph files by default any more. Use the -a option to run all tests.
-a
The perlglossary manpage is a glossary of terms used in the Perl documentation, technical and otherwise, kindly provided by O'Reilly Media, inc.
Weak reference creation is now O(1) rather than O(n), courtesy of Nicholas Clark. Weak reference deletion remains O(n), but if deletion only happens at program exit, it may be skipped completely.
Salvador Fandiño provided improvements to reduce the memory usage of sort and to speed up some cases.
sort
Jarkko Hietaniemi and Andy Lester worked to mark as much data as possible in the C source files as static, to increase the proportion of the executable file that the operating system can share between process, and thus reduce real memory usage on multi-user systems.
static
Parallel makes should work properly now, although there may still be problems if make test is instructed to run in parallel.
make test
Building with Borland's compilers on Win32 should work more smoothly. In particular Steve Hay has worked to side step many warnings emitted by their compilers and at least one C compiler internal error.
Configure will now detect clearenv and unsetenv, thanks to a patch from Alan Burlison. It will also probe for futimes and whether sprintf correctly returns the length of the formatted string, which will both be used in perl 5.8.9.
Configure
clearenv
unsetenv
futimes
sprintf
There are improved hints for next-3.0, vmesa, IX, Darwin, Solaris, Linux, DEC/OSF, HP-UX and MPE/iX
Perl extensions on Windows now can be statically built into the Perl DLL, thanks to a work by Vadim Konovalov. (This improvement was actually in 5.8.7, but was accidentally omitted from perl587delta).
Previously when running with warnings enabled globally via -w, selective disabling of specific warning categories would actually turn off all warnings. This is now fixed; now no warnings 'io'; will only turn off warnings in the io class. Previously it would erroneously turn off all warnings.
-w
no warnings 'io';
io
This bug fix may cause some programs to start correctly issuing warnings.
Perl 5.8.4 introduced a change so that assignments of undef to a scalar, or of an empty list to an array or a hash, were optimised away. As this could cause problems when goto jumps were involved, this change has been backed out.
goto
Using the sprintf() function with some formats could lead to a buffer overflow in some specific cases. This has been fixed, along with several other bugs, notably in bounds checking.
In related fixes, it was possible for badly written code that did not follow the documentation of Sys::Syslog to have formatting vulnerabilities. Sys::Syslog has been changed to protect people from poor quality third party code.
It had been reported that running under perl's debugger when processing Unicode data could cause unexpectedly large slowdowns. The most likely cause of this was identified and fixed by Nicholas Clark.
FindBin now works better with directories where access rights are more restrictive than usual.
Several memory leaks in ithreads were closed. An improved implementation of threads::shared is available on CPAN - this will be merged into 5.8.9 if it proves stable.
Trailing spaces are now trimmed from $! and $^E.
$!
$^E
Operations that require perl to read a process's list of groups, such as reads of $( and $), now dynamically allocate memory rather than using a fixed sized array. The fixed size array could cause C stack exhaustion on systems configured to use large numbers of groups.
$(
$)
PerlIO::scalar now works better with non-default $/ settings.
$/
You can now use the x operator to repeat a qw// list. This used to raise a syntax error.
x
qw//
The debugger now traces correctly execution in eval("")uated code that contains #line directives.
The value of the open pragma is no longer ignored for three-argument opens.
The optimisation of for (reverse @a) introduced in perl 5.8.6 could misbehave when the array had undefined elements and was used in LVALUE context. Dave Mitchell provided a fix.
for (reverse @a)
Some case insensitive matches between UTF-8 encoded data and 8 bit regexps, and vice versa, could give malformed character warnings. These have been fixed by Dave Mitchell and Yves Orton.
lcfirst and ucfirst could corrupt the string for certain cases where the length UTF-8 encoding of the string in lower case, upper case or title case differed. This was fixed by Nicholas Clark.
lcfirst
ucfirst
Perl will now use the C library calls unsetenv and clearenv if present to delete keys from %ENV and delete %ENV entirely, thanks to a patch from Alan Burlison.
%ENV
This is a new warning, produced in situations such as this:
$r = do {my @a; \$#a}; $$r = 503;
This is a new warning, produced when number has been passed as a argument to select(), instead of a bitmask.
# Wrong, will now warn $rin = fileno(STDIN); ($nfound,$timeleft) = select($rout=$rin, undef, undef, $timeout); # Should be $rin = ''; vec($rin,fileno(STDIN),1) = 1; ($nfound,$timeleft) = select($rout=$rin, undef, undef, $timeout);
This syntax error indicates that the lexer couldn't find the final delimiter of a ?PATTERN? construct. Mentioning the ternary operator in this error message makes it easier to diagnose syntax errors.
?PATTERN?
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 5.8.7, in particular due to a change contributed by Dave Mitchell which reworked the warnings code to be significantly smaller. Apart from being smaller and possibly faster, there should be no user-detectable changes.
C
perl
Andy Lester supplied many improvements to determine which function parameters and local variables could actually be declared const to the C compiler. Steve Peters provided new *_set macros and reworked the core to use these rather than assigning to macros in LVALUE context.
const
*_set
Dave Mitchell improved the lexer debugging output under -DT
-DT
Nicholas Clark changed the string buffer allocation so that it is now rounded up to the next multiple of 4 (or 8 on platforms with 64 bit pointers). This should reduce the number of calls to realloc without actually using any extra memory.
realloc
The HV's array of HE*s is now allocated at the correct (minimal) size, thanks to another change by Nicholas Clark. Compile with -DPERL_USE_LARGE_HV_ALLOC to use the old, sloppier, default.
HV
HE*
-DPERL_USE_LARGE_HV_ALLOC
For XS or embedding debugging purposes, if perl is compiled with -DDEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS_FORK_DUMP in addition to -DDEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS then a child process is forked just before global destruction, which is used to display the values of any scalars found to have leaked at the end of global destruction. Without this, the scalars have already been freed sufficiently at the point of detection that it is impossible to produce any meaningful dump of their contents. This feature was implemented by the indefatigable Nicholas Clark, based on an idea by Mike Giroux.
-DDEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS_FORK_DUMP
-DDEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS
fork
The optimiser on HP-UX 11.23 (Itanium 2) is currently partly disabled (scaled down to +O1) when using HP C-ANSI-C; the cause of problems at higher optimisation levels is still unclear.
There are a handful of remaining test failures on VMS, mostly due to test fixes and minor module tweaks with too many dependencies to integrate into this release from the development stream, where they have all been corrected. The following is a list of expected failures with the patch number of the fix where that is known:
ext/Devel/PPPort/t/ppphtest.t #26913 ext/List/Util/t/p_tainted.t #26912 lib/ExtUtils/t/PL_FILES.t #26813 lib/ExtUtils/t/basic.t #26813 t/io/fs.t t/op/cmp.t
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/
perl -V
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.
1 POD Error
The following errors were encountered while parsing the POD:
Non-ASCII character seen before =encoding in 'Fandiño'. Assuming UTF-8
To install Env, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm Env
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install Env
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.