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.Attribute::Handlers
upgraded to version 0.78_02
attrs
upgraded to version 1.02
autouse
upgraded to version 1.05
B
upgraded to version 1.09_01
B::
modules has been corrected; B::NV
now inherits from B::SV
(instead of B::IV
).blib
upgraded to version 1.03
ByteLoader
upgraded to version 0.06
CGI
upgraded to version 3.15
self_url()
removedscrolling_list()
select attribute fixedvirtual_port
now works properly with the https protocolupload_hook()
and append()
now works in function-oriented modePOST_MAX
doesn't cause the client to hang any more-tabindex
pragma has been added to turn automatic indexes back onend_form()
doesn't emit empty (and non-validating) <div>
CGI::Carp
works better in certain mod_perl configurations$CGI::TMPDIRECTORY
is now effectivecharnames
upgraded to version 1.05
viacode()
now accept hex strings and has been optimized.CPAN
upgraded to version 1.76_02
Cwd
upgraded to version 3.12
canonpath()
on Win32 now collapses foo\.. sections correctly.Data::Dumper
upgraded to version 2.121_08
Data::Dumper
would sometimes update the iterator state of hashes has been fixedDB
upgraded to version 1.01
DB_File
upgraded to version 1.814
Devel::DProf
upgraded to version 20050603.00
Devel::Peek
upgraded to version 1.03
Devel::PPPort
upgraded to version 3.06_01
--compat-version
argument checking has been improved--nofilter
option to override the filtering has been addeddiagnostics
upgraded to version 1.15
Digest
upgraded to version 1.14
Digest::MD5
upgraded to version 2.36
XSLoader
is now used for faster loadingDumpvalue
upgraded to version 1.12
DynaLoader
upgraded but unfortunately we're not able to increment its version number :-(
dl_unload_file
on Win32XSLoader
0.06 incorporated; small optimisation for calling bootstrap_inherit()
and documentation enhancements.Encode
upgraded to version 2.12
CHECK
!MIME-Header-ISO_2022_JP
addedencoding(utf-8-strict)
fixed.English
upgraded to version 1.02
$COMPILING
variable has been addedExtUtils::Constant
upgraded to version 0.17
ExtUtils::MakeMaker
upgraded to version 6.30 (was 6.17)
File::Basename
upgraded to version 2.74,
with changes contributed by Michael Schwern.
basename
now strips trailing path separators before processing the name.basename
now returns /
for parameter /
,
to make basename
consistent with the shell utility of the same name.File::Copy
upgraded to version 2.09
File::Find
upgraded to version 1.10
File::Glob
upgraded to version 1.05
File::Path
upgraded to version 1.08
mkpath
now preserves errno
when mkdir
failsFile::Spec
upgraded to version 3.12
File::Spec-
rootdir()> now returns \
on Win32,
instead of /
$^O
could sometimes become tainted.
This has been fixed.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.FileCache
upgraded to version 1.06
Filter::Simple
upgraded to version 0.82FindBin
upgraded to version 1.47
GDBM_File
upgraded to version 1.08
Getopt::Long
upgraded to version 2.35
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.if
upgraded to version 0.05
if
when invoked with a condition in list context.IO
upgraded to version 1.22
IPC::Open2
upgraded to version 1.02
IPC::Open3
upgraded to version 1.02
List::Util
upgraded to version 1.18 (was 1.14)
refaddr
to avoid blessing an un-blessed referenceXSLoader
for faster loadingMath::Complex
upgraded to version 1.35
atan2(0,
i)
now works,
as do all the (computable) complex argument casesmake
and emake
[2,-3pi/8]
in emake
inf
for make
/emake
make
/emake
more visiblyMath::Trig
upgraded to version 1.03
great_circle_waypoint
and great_circle_destination
MIME::Base64
upgraded to version 3.07
XSLoader
for faster loadingNDBM_File
upgraded to version 1.06
ODBM_File
upgraded to version 1.06
Opcode
upgraded to version 1.06
open
upgraded to version 1.05
overload
upgraded to version 1.04
PerlIO
upgraded to version 1.04
PerlIO::via
iterate over layers properly nowPerlIO::scalar
understands $/ = ""
nowencoding(utf-8-strict)
with partial characters now worksPod::Functions
upgraded to version 1.03
Pod::Html
upgraded to version 1.0504
=item
s on the same page,
and should be valid XHTML.Pod::Parser
upgraded to version 1.32
=head
on the first linepod2usage
fixed-noperldoc
switch for pod2usage
POSIX
upgraded to version 1.09
re
upgraded to version 0.05
Safe
upgraded to version 2.12
SDBM_File
upgraded to version 1.05
Socket
upgraded to version 1.78
Storable
upgraded to version 2.15
STORABLE_attach
hook functionality added by Adam Kennedy,
and more frugal memory requirements when storing under ithreads
,
by using the ithreads
cloning tracking code.Switch
upgraded to version 2.10_01
Sys::Syslog
upgraded to version 0.13
Exporter
tags.Sys::Hostname
as it may provide useless values in unconfigured network environments,
so instead uses INADDR_LOOPBACK
directly.syslog()
now uses local timestamp.setlogmask()
now behaves like its C counterpart.setlogsock()
will now croak()
as documented.Term::ANSIColor
upgraded to version 1.10
colored
when $EACHLINE
is set that caused it to not color lines consisting solely of 0 (literal zero).Term::ReadLine
upgraded to version 1.02
Test::Harness
upgraded to version 2.56 (was 2.48)
Test::Harness
timer is now off by default.Test::Simple
upgraded to version 0.62 (was 0.54)
is_deeply()
no longer fails to work for many casesText::Tabs
upgraded to version 2005.0824
expand
Text::Wrap
upgraded to version 2005.082401
$Text::Wrap::separator2
,
which allows you to preserve existing newlines but add line-breaks with some other string.threads
upgraded to version 1.07
threads
will now honour no warnings 'threads'
$t->join()
rather than after undef $t
,
which should fix some ithreads
memory leaks.
(Fixed by Dave Mitchell)threads::shared
upgraded to version 0.94
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
Time::HiRes
upgraded to version 1.86 (was 1.66)
clock_nanosleep()
and clock()
functions addedclock_gettime()
and clock_getres()
has been addedundef
or an empty list if the C gettimeofday()
function failsnanosleep
detectionUnicode::Collate
upgraded to version 0.52
Unicode::Collate-
new> method no longer overwrites user's $_
Unicode::UCD
upgraded to version 0.24
User::grent
upgraded to version 1.01
utf8
upgraded to version 1.06
vmsish
upgraded to version 1.02
warnings
upgraded to version 1.05
Carp::
internalsWin32
upgraded to version 0.2601
Win32::GetOSName
XS::Typemap
upgraded to version 0.02
h2xs
enhancementsh2xs
implements new option --use-xsloader
to force use of XSLoader
even in backwards compatible modules.
The handling of authors' names that had apostrophes has been fixed.
Any enums with negative values are now skipped.
perlivp
enhancementsperlivp
implements new option -a
and will not check for *.ph files by default any more.
Use the -a
option to run all tests.
The perlglossary manpage is a glossary of terms used in the Perl documentation, technical and otherwise, kindly provided by O'Reilly Media, inc.
sort
and to speed up some cases.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.Parallel makes should work properly now,
although there may still be problems if make test
is instructed to run in parallel.
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.
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.
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.
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.threads::shared
is available on CPAN - this will be merged into 5.8.9 if it proves stable.$!
and $^E
.$(
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.x
operator to repeat a qw//
list.
This used to raise a syntax error.open
pragma is no longer ignored for three-argument opens.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.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.unsetenv
and clearenv
if present to delete keys from %ENV
and delete %ENV
entirely,
thanks to a patch from Alan Burlison.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.
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.
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.
Dave Mitchell improved the lexer debugging output under -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.
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.
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 fork
ed 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.
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/
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.