NAME
perl588delta - what is new for perl v5.8.8
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.8.7 release and
the 5.8.8 release.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.8.7. If any exist,
they are bugs and reports are welcome.
Core Enhancements
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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.
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Modules and Pragmata
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Attribute::Handlers upgraded to version 0.78_02
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attrs upgraded to version 1.02
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autouse upgraded to version 1.05
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Simplified implementation
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B upgraded to version 1.09_01
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The inheritance hierarchy of the B:: modules has been corrected;
B::NV now inherits from B::SV (instead of B::IV ).
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blib upgraded to version 1.03
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ByteLoader upgraded to version 0.06
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CGI upgraded to version 3.15
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Extraneous ? from self_url() removed
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scrolling_list() select attribute fixed
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virtual_port now works properly with the https protocol
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upload_hook() and append() now works in function-oriented mode
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POST_MAX doesn’t cause the client to hang any more
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Automatic tab indexes are now disabled and new -tabindex pragma has
been added to turn automatic indexes back on
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end_form() doesn’t emit empty (and non-validating) <div>
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CGI::Carp works better in certain mod_perl configurations
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Setting $CGI::TMPDIRECTORY is now effective
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Enhanced documentation
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charnames upgraded to version 1.05
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viacode() now accept hex strings and has been optimized.
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CPAN upgraded to version 1.76_02
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1 minor bug fix for Win32
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Cwd upgraded to version 3.12
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canonpath() on Win32 now collapses foo\.. sections correctly.
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Improved behaviour on Symbian OS.
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Enhanced documentation and typo fixes
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Internal cleanup
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Data::Dumper upgraded to version 2.121_08
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A problem where Data::Dumper would sometimes update the iterator state
of hashes has been fixed
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Numeric labels now work
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Internal cleanup
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DB upgraded to version 1.01
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A problem where the state of the regexp engine would sometimes get clobbered when running
under the debugger has been fixed.
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DB_File upgraded to version 1.814
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Adds support for Berkeley DB 4.4.
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Devel::DProf upgraded to version 20050603.00
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Devel::Peek upgraded to version 1.03
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Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.06_01
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--compat-version argument checking has been improved
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Files passed on the command line are filtered by default
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--nofilter option to override the filtering has been added
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Enhanced documentation
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diagnostics upgraded to version 1.15
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Digest upgraded to version 1.14
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The constructor now knows which module implements SHA-224
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Documentation tweaks and typo fixes
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Digest::MD5 upgraded to version 2.36
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XSLoader is now used for faster loading
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Enhanced documentation including MD5 weaknesses discovered lately
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Dumpvalue upgraded to version 1.12
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DynaLoader upgraded but unfortunately we’re not able to increment its version number :-(
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Implements dl_unload_file on Win32
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Internal cleanup
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XSLoader 0.06 incorporated; small optimisation for calling
bootstrap_inherit() and documentation enhancements.
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Encode upgraded to version 2.12
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A coderef is now acceptable for CHECK !
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3 new characters added to the ISO-8859-7 encoding
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New encoding MIME-Header-ISO_2022_JP added
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Problem with partial characters and encoding(utf-8-strict) fixed.
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Documentation enhancements and typo fixes
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English upgraded to version 1.02
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the $COMPILING variable has been added
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ExtUtils::Constant upgraded to version 0.17
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Improved compatibility with older versions of perl
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ExtUtils::MakeMaker upgraded to version 6.30 (was 6.17)
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File::Basename upgraded to version 2.74, with changes contributed by Michael Schwern.
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Documentation clarified and errors corrected.
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basename now strips trailing path separators before processing the name.
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basename now returns / for parameter / , to make basename
consistent with the shell utility of the same name.
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The suffix is no longer stripped if it is identical to the remaining characters
in the name, again for consistency with the shell utility.
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Some internal code cleanup.
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File::Copy upgraded to version 2.09
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Copying a file onto itself used to fail.
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Moving a file between file systems now preserves the access and
modification time stamps
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File::Find upgraded to version 1.10
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Win32 portability fixes
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Enhanced documentation
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File::Glob upgraded to version 1.05
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File::Path upgraded to version 1.08
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mkpath now preserves errno when mkdir fails
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File::Spec upgraded to version 3.12
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File::Spec- rootdir()> now returns \ on Win32, instead of /
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$^O could sometimes become tainted. This has been fixed.
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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.
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Some documentation improvements
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Some internal code cleanup
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FileCache upgraded to version 1.06
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POD formatting errors in the documentation fixed
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Filter::Simple upgraded to version 0.82
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FindBin upgraded to version 1.47
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Now works better with directories where access rights are more
restrictive than usual.
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GDBM_File upgraded to version 1.08
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Getopt::Long upgraded to version 2.35
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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.
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Options can now take multiple values at once (experimental)
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Various bug fixes
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if upgraded to version 0.05
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Give more meaningful error messages from if when invoked with a
condition in list context.
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Restore backwards compatibility with earlier versions of perl
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IO upgraded to version 1.22
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Enhanced documentation
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Internal cleanup
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IPC::Open2 upgraded to version 1.02
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IPC::Open3 upgraded to version 1.02
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List::Util upgraded to version 1.18 (was 1.14)
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Fix pure-perl version of refaddr to avoid blessing an un-blessed reference
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Use XSLoader for faster loading
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Fixed various memory leaks
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Internal cleanup and portability fixes
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Math::Complex upgraded to version 1.35
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atan2(0, i) now works, as do all the (computable) complex argument cases
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Fixes for certain bugs in make and emake
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Support returning the kth root directly
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Support [2,-3pi/8] in emake
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Support inf for make /emake
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Document make /emake more visibly
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Math::Trig upgraded to version 1.03
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Add more great circle routines: great_circle_waypoint and
great_circle_destination
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MIME::Base64 upgraded to version 3.07
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Use XSLoader for faster loading
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Enhanced documentation
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Internal cleanup
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NDBM_File upgraded to version 1.06
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ODBM_File upgraded to version 1.06
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Documentation typo fixed
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Internal cleanup
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Opcode upgraded to version 1.06
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Enhanced documentation
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Internal cleanup
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open upgraded to version 1.05
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overload upgraded to version 1.04
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PerlIO upgraded to version 1.04
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PerlIO::via iterate over layers properly now
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PerlIO::scalar understands $/ = "" now
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encoding(utf-8-strict) with partial characters now works
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Enhanced documentation
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Internal cleanup
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Pod::Functions upgraded to version 1.03
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Documentation typos fixed
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Pod::Html upgraded to version 1.0504
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HTML output will now correctly link
to =item s on the same page, and should be valid XHTML.
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Variable names are recognized as intended
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Documentation typos fixed
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Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.32
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Allow files that start with =head on the first line
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Win32 portability fix
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Exit status of pod2usage fixed
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New -noperldoc switch for pod2usage
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Arbitrary URL schemes now allowed
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Documentation typos fixed
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POSIX upgraded to version 1.09
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Documentation typos fixed
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Internal cleanup
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re upgraded to version 0.05
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Documentation typo fixed
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Safe upgraded to version 2.12
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Minor documentation enhancement
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SDBM_File upgraded to version 1.05
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Documentation typo fixed
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Internal cleanup
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Socket upgraded to version 1.78
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Storable upgraded to version 2.15
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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.
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Switch upgraded to version 2.10_01
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Documentation typos fixed
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Sys::Syslog upgraded to version 0.13
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Now provides numeric macros and meaningful Exporter tags.
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No longer uses Sys::Hostname as it may provide useless values in
unconfigured network environments, so instead uses INADDR_LOOPBACK directly.
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syslog() now uses local timestamp.
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setlogmask() now behaves like its C counterpart.
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setlogsock() will now croak() as documented.
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Improved error and warnings messages.
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Improved documentation.
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Term::ANSIColor upgraded to version 1.10
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Fixes a bug in colored when $EACHLINE is set that caused it to not color
lines consisting solely of 0 (literal zero).
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Improved tests.
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Term::ReadLine upgraded to version 1.02
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Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.56 (was 2.48)
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The Test::Harness timer is now off by default.
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Now shows elapsed time in milliseconds.
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Various bug fixes
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Test::Simple upgraded to version 0.62 (was 0.54)
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is_deeply() no longer fails to work for many cases
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Various minor bug fixes
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Documentation enhancements
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Text::Tabs upgraded to version 2005.0824
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Provides a faster implementation of expand
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Text::Wrap upgraded to version 2005.082401
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Adds $Text::Wrap::separator2 , which allows you to preserve existing newlines
but add line-breaks with some other string.
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threads upgraded to version 1.07
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threads will now honour no warnings threads
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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)
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Some documentation typo fixes.
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threads::shared upgraded to version 0.94
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Documentation changes only
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Note: An improved implementation of threads::shared is available on
CPAN - this will be merged into 5.8.9 if it proves stable.
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Tie::Hash upgraded to version 1.02
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Documentation typo fixed
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Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.86 (was 1.66)
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clock_nanosleep() and clock() functions added
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Support for the POSIX clock_gettime() and clock_getres() has been added
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Return undef or an empty list if the C gettimeofday() function fails
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Improved nanosleep detection
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Internal cleanup
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Enhanced documentation
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Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.52
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Now implements UCA Revision 14 (based on Unicode 4.1.0).
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Unicode::Collate- new> method no longer overwrites user’s $_
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Enhanced documentation
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Unicode::UCD upgraded to version 0.24
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Documentation typos fixed
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User::grent upgraded to version 1.01
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Documentation typo fixed
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utf8 upgraded to version 1.06
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Documentation typos fixed
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vmsish upgraded to version 1.02
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Documentation typos fixed
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warnings upgraded to version 1.05
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Gentler messing with Carp:: internals
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Internal cleanup
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Documentation update
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Win32 upgraded to version 0.2601
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Provides Windows Vista support to Win32::GetOSName
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Documentation enhancements
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XS::Typemap upgraded to version 0.02
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Utility Changes
\f(CWh2xs\fP enhancements
h2xs
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.
\f(CWperlivp\fP enhancements
perlivp
implements new option
-a
and will not check for
*.ph
files by default any more. Use the
-a
option to run
all tests.
New Documentation
The perlglossary manpage is a glossary of terms used in the Perl
documentation, technical and otherwise, kindly provided by O’Reilly Media,
inc.
Performance Enhancements
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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.
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Salvador Fandinõ provided improvements to reduce the memory usage of sort
and to speed up some cases.
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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.
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Installation and Configuration Improvements
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).
Selected Bug Fixes
no warnings 'category' works correctly with \-w
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.
Remove over-optimisation
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.
\fIsprintf()\fP fixes
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.
Debugger and Unicode slowdown
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.
Smaller fixes
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FindBin now works better with directories where access rights are more
restrictive than usual.
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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.
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Trailing spaces are now trimmed from $! and $^E .
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Operations that require perl to read a process’ 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.
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PerlIO::scalar now works better with non-default $/ settings.
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You can now use the x operator to repeat a qw// list. This used
to raise a syntax error.
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The debugger now traces correctly execution in eval("")uated code that
contains #line directives.
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The value of the open pragma is no longer ignored for three-argument
opens.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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New or Changed Diagnostics
Attempt to set length of freed array
This is a new warning, produced in situations such as this:
$r = do {my @a; \$#a};
$$r = 503;
Non-string passed as bitmask
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);
Search pattern not terminated or ternary operator parsed as search pattern
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.
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 5.8.7, 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.
Platform Specific Problems
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
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.
