


PERL589DELTA(1)  Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL589DELTA(1)


NAME
       perl589delta - what is new for perl v5.8.9

DESCRIPTION
       This document describes differences between the 5.8.8
       release and the 5.8.9 release.

Notice
       The 5.8.9 release will be the last significant release of
       the 5.8.x series. Any future releases of 5.8.x will likely
       only be to deal with security issues, and platform build
       failures. Hence you should look to migrating to 5.10.x, if
       you have not started already.  See "Known Problems" for
       more information.

Incompatible Changes
       A particular construction in the source code of extensions
       written in C++ may need changing. See "Changed Internals"
       for more details. All extensions written in C, most
       written in C++, and all existing compiled extensions are
       unaffected. This was necessary to improve C++ support.

       Other than this, there are no changes intentionally
       incompatible with 5.8.8.  If any exist, they are bugs and
       reports are welcome.

Core Enhancements
   Unicode Character Database 5.1.0.
       The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in
       Perl 5.8 has been updated to 5.1.0 from 4.1.0. See
       <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/#NotableChanges>
       for the notable changes.

   stat and -X on directory handles
       It is now possible to call "stat" and the "-X" filestat
       operators on directory handles. As both directory and file
       handles are barewords, there can be ambiguities over which
       was intended. In these situations the file handle
       semantics are preferred. Both also treat *FILE{IO}
       filehandles like *FILE filehandles.

   Source filters in @INC
       It's possible to enhance the mechanism of subroutine hooks
       in @INC by adding a source filter on top of the filehandle
       opened and returned by the hook. This feature was planned
       a long time ago, but wasn't quite working until now. See
       "require" in perlfunc for details. (Nicholas Clark)

   Exceptions in constant folding
       The constant folding routine is now wrapped in an
       exception handler, and if folding throws an exception
       (such as attempting to evaluate 0/0), perl now retains the
       current optree, rather than aborting the whole program.
       Without this change, programs would not compile if they



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       had expressions that happened to generate exceptions, even
       though those expressions were in code that could never be
       reached at runtime. (Nicholas Clark, Dave Mitchell)

   "no VERSION"
       You can now use "no" followed by a version number to
       specify that you want to use a version of perl older than
       the specified one.

   Improved internal UTF-8 caching code
       The code that caches calculated UTF-8 byte offsets for
       character offsets for a string has been re-written.
       Several bugs have been located and eliminated, and the
       code now makes better use of the information it has, so
       should be faster. In particular, it doesn't scan to the
       end of a string before calculating an offset within the
       string, which should speed up some operations on long
       strings. It is now possible to disable the caching code at
       run time, to verify that it is not the cause of suspected
       problems.

   Runtime relocatable installations
       There is now Configure support for creating a perl tree
       that is relocatable at run time. see "Relocatable
       installations".

   New internal variables
       "${^CHILD_ERROR_NATIVE}"
           This variable gives the native status returned by the
           last pipe close, backtick command, successful call to
           "wait" or "waitpid", or from the "system" operator.
           See perlvar for details. (Contributed by Gisle Aas.)

       "${^UTF8CACHE}"
           This variable controls the state of the internal UTF-8
           offset caching code.  1 for on (the default), 0 for
           off, -1 to debug the caching code by checking all its
           results against linear scans, and panicing on any
           discrepancy.

   "readpipe" is now overridable
       The built-in function "readpipe" is now overridable.
       Overriding it permits also to override its operator
       counterpart, "qx//" (also known as "``").

   simple exception handling macros
       Perl 5.8.9 (and 5.10.0 onwards) now provides a couple of
       macros to do very basic exception handling in XS modules.
       You can use these macros if you call code that may
       "croak", but you need to do some cleanup before giving
       control back to Perl. See "Exception Handling" in perlguts
       for more details.





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   -D option enhancements
       o   "-Dq" suppresses the EXECUTING... message when running
           under "-D"

       o   "-Dl" logs runops loop entry and exit, and jump level
           popping.

       o   "-Dv" displays the process id as part of the trace
           output.

   XS-assisted SWASHGET
       Some pure-perl code that the regexp engine was using to
       retrieve Unicode properties and transliteration mappings
       has been reimplemented in XS for faster execution.
       (SADAHIRO Tomoyuki)

   Constant subroutines
       The interpreter internals now support a far more memory
       efficient form of inlineable constants. Storing a
       reference to a constant value in a symbol table is
       equivalent to a full typeglob referencing a constant
       subroutine, but using about 400 bytes less memory. This
       proxy constant subroutine is automatically upgraded to a
       real typeglob with subroutine if necessary.  The approach
       taken is analogous to the existing space optimisation for
       subroutine stub declarations, which are stored as plain
       scalars in place of the full typeglob.

       However, to aid backwards compatibility of existing code,
       which (wrongly) does not expect anything other than
       typeglobs in symbol tables, nothing in core uses this
       feature, other than the regression tests.

       Stubs for prototyped subroutines have been stored in
       symbol tables as plain strings, and stubs for unprototyped
       subroutines as the number -1, since 5.005, so code which
       assumes that the core only places typeglobs in symbol
       tables has been making incorrect assumptions for over 10
       years.

New Platforms
       Compile support added for:

       o   DragonFlyBSD

       o   MidnightBSD

       o   MirOS BSD

       o   RISC OS

       o   Cray XT4/Catamount





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Modules and Pragmata
   New Modules
       o   "Module::Pluggable" is a simple framework to create
           modules that accept pluggable sub-modules. The bundled
           version is 3.8

       o   "Module::CoreList" is a hash of hashes that is keyed
           on perl version as indicated in $]. The bundled
           version is 2.17

       o   "Win32API::File" now available in core on Microsoft
           Windows. The bundled version is 0.1001_01

       o   "Devel::InnerPackage" finds all the packages defined
           by a single file. It is part of the
           "Module::Pluggable" distribution. The bundled version
           is 0.3

   Updated Modules
       o   "attributes" upgraded to version 0.09

       o   "AutoLoader" upgraded to version 5.67

       o   "AutoSplit" upgraded to 1.06

       o   "autouse" upgraded to version 1.06

       o   "B" upgraded from 1.09_01 to 1.19

           o   provides new pad related abstraction macros
               "B::NV::COP_SEQ_RANGE_LOW",
               "B::NV::COP_SEQ_RANGE_HIGH",
               "B::NV::PARENT_PAD_INDEX",
               "B::NV::PARENT_FAKELEX_FLAGS", which hides the
               difference in storage in 5.10.0 and later.

           o   provides "B::sub_generation", which exposes
               "PL_sub_generation"

           o   provides "B::GV::isGV_with_GP", which on pre-5.10
               perls always returns true.

           o   New type "B::HE" added with methods "VAL", "HASH"
               and "SVKEY_force"

           o   The "B::GVf_IMPORTED_CV" flag is now set correctly
               when a proxy constant subroutine is imported.

           o   bugs fixed in the handling of "PMOP"s.

           o   "B::BM::PREVIOUS" returns now "U32", not "U16".
               "B::CV::START" and "B:CV::ROOT" return now "NULL"
               on an XSUB, "B::CV::XSUB" and "B::CV::XSUBANY"
               return 0 on a non-XSUB.



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       o   "B::C" upgraded to 1.05

       o   "B::Concise" upgraded to 0.76

           o   new option "-src" causes the rendering of each
               statement (starting with the nextstate OP) to be
               preceded by the first line of source code that
               generates it.

           o   new option "-stash="somepackage"", "require"s
               "somepackage", and then renders each function
               defined in its namespace.

           o   now has documentation of detailed hint symbols.

       o   "B::Debug" upgraded to version 1.05

       o   "B::Deparse" upgraded to version 0.87

           o   properly deparse "print readpipe $x, $y".

           o   now handles "''-"()>, "::()", "sub :: {}", etc.
               correctly [RT #43010].  All bugs in parsing these
               kinds of syntax are now fixed:

                   perl -MO=Deparse -e '"my %h = "->()'
                   perl -MO=Deparse -e '::->()'
                   perl -MO=Deparse -e 'sub :: {}'
                   perl -MO=Deparse -e 'package a; sub a::b::c {}'
                   perl -MO=Deparse -e 'sub the::main::road {}'

           o   does not deparse $^H{v_string}, which is
               automatically set by the internals.

       o   "B::Lint" upgraded to version 1.11

       o   "B::Terse" upgraded to version 1.05

       o   "base" upgraded to version 2.13

           o   loading a module via base.pm would mask a global
               $SIG{__DIE__} in that module.

           o   push all classes at once in @ISA

       o   "Benchmark" upgraded to version 1.10

       o   "bigint" upgraded to 0.23

       o   "bignum" upgraded to 0.23

       o   "bigrat" upgraded to 0.23

       o   "blib" upgraded to 0.04



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       o   "Carp" upgraded to version 1.10

           The argument backtrace code now shows "undef" as
           "undef", instead of a string "undef".

       o   "CGI" upgraded to version 3.42

       o   "charnames" upgraded to 1.06

       o   "constant" upgraded to version 1.17

       o   "CPAN" upgraded to version 1.9301

       o   "Cwd" upgraded to version 3.29 with some platform
           specific improvements (including for VMS).

       o   "Data::Dumper" upgraded to version 2.121_17

           o   Fixes hash iterator current position with the pure
               Perl version [RT #40668]

           o   Performance enhancements, which will be most
               evident on platforms where repeated calls to C's
               "realloc()" are slow, such as Win32.

       o   "DB_File" upgraded to version 1.817

       o   "DB_Filter" upgraded to version 0.02

       o   "Devel::DProf" upgraded to version 20080331.00

       o   "Devel::Peek" upgraded to version 1.04

       o   "Devel::PPPort" upgraded to version 3.14

       o   "diagnostics" upgraded to version 1.16

       o   "Digest" upgraded to version 1.15

       o   "Digest::MD5" upgraded to version 2.37

       o   "DirHandle" upgraded to version 1.02

           o   now localises $., $@, $!, $^E, and $? before
               closing the directory handle to suppress leaking
               any side effects of warnings about it already
               being closed.

       o   "DynaLoader" upgraded to version 1.09

           "DynaLoader" can now dynamically load a loadable
           object from a file with a non-default file extension.

       o   "Encode" upgraded to version 2.26



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           "Encode::Alias" includes a fix for encoding "646" on
           Solaris (better known as ASCII).

       o   "English" upgraded to version 1.03

       o   "Errno" upgraded to version 1.10

       o   "Exporter" upgraded to version 5.63

       o   "ExtUtils::Command" upgraded to version 1.15

       o   "ExtUtils::Constant" upgraded to version 0.21

       o   "ExtUtils::Embed" upgraded to version 1.28

       o   "ExtUtils::Install" upgraded to version 1.50_01

       o   "ExtUtils::Installed" upgraded to version 1.43

       o   "ExtUtils::MakeMaker" upgraded to version 6.48

           o   support for "INSTALLSITESCRIPT" and
               "INSTALLVENDORSCRIPT" configuration.

       o   "ExtUtils::Manifest" upgraded to version 1.55

       o   "ExtUtils::ParseXS" upgraded to version 2.19

       o   "Fatal" upgraded to version 1.06

           o   allows built-ins in "CORE::GLOBAL" to be made
               fatal.

       o   "Fcntl" upgraded to version 1.06

       o   "fields" upgraded to version 2.12

       o   "File::Basename" upgraded to version 2.77

       o   "FileCache" upgraded to version 1.07

       o   "File::Compare" upgraded to 1.1005

       o   "File::Copy" upgraded to 2.13

           o   now uses 3-arg open.

       o   "File::DosGlob" upgraded to 1.01

       o   "File::Find" upgraded to version 1.13

       o   "File::Glob" upgraded to version 1.06

           o   fixes spurious results with brackets inside



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               braces.

       o   "File::Path" upgraded to version 2.07_02

       o   "File::Spec" upgraded to version 3.29

           o   improved handling of bad arguments.

           o   some platform specific improvements (including for
               VMS and Cygwin), with an optimisation on "abs2rel"
               when handling both relative arguments.

       o   "File::stat" upgraded to version 1.01

       o   "File::Temp" upgraded to version 0.20

       o   "filetest" upgraded to version 1.02

       o   "Filter::Util::Call" upgraded to version 1.07

       o   "Filter::Simple" upgraded to version 0.83

       o   "FindBin" upgraded to version 1.49

       o   "GDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.09

       o   "Getopt::Long" upgraded to version 2.37

       o   "Getopt::Std" upgraded to version 1.06

       o   "Hash::Util" upgraded to version 0.06

       o   "if" upgraded to version 0.05

       o   "IO" upgraded to version 1.23

           Reduced number of calls to "getpeername" in
           "IO::Socket"

       o   "IPC::Open" upgraded to version 1.03

       o   "IPC::Open3" upgraded to version 1.03

       o   "IPC::SysV" upgraded to version 2.00

       o   "lib" upgraded to version 0.61

           o   avoid warning about loading .par files.

       o   "libnet" upgraded to version 1.22

       o   "List::Util" upgraded to 1.19

       o   "Locale::Maketext" upgraded to 1.13



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       o   "Math::BigFloat" upgraded to version 1.60

       o   "Math::BigInt" upgraded to version 1.89

       o   "Math::BigRat" upgraded to version 0.22

           o   implements new "as_float" method.

       o   "Math::Complex" upgraded to version 1.54.

       o   "Math::Trig" upgraded to version 1.18.

       o   "NDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.07

           o   improve g++ handling for systems using GDBM
               compatibility headers.

       o   "Net::Ping" upgraded to version 2.35

       o   "NEXT" upgraded to version 0.61

           o   fix several bugs with "NEXT" when working with
               "AUTOLOAD", "eval" block, and within overloaded
               stringification.

       o   "ODBM_File" upgraded to 1.07

       o   "open" upgraded to 1.06

       o   "ops" upgraded to 1.02

       o   "PerlIO::encoding" upgraded to version 0.11

       o   "PerlIO::scalar" upgraded to version 0.06

           o   [RT #40267] "PerlIO::scalar" doesn't respect
               readonly-ness.

       o   "PerlIO::via" upgraded to version 0.05

       o   "Pod::Html" upgraded to version 1.09

       o   "Pod::Parser" upgraded to version 1.35

       o   "Pod::Usage" upgraded to version 1.35

       o   "POSIX" upgraded to version 1.15

           o   "POSIX" constants that duplicate those in "Fcntl"
               are now imported from "Fcntl" and re-exported,
               rather than being duplicated by "POSIX"

           o   "POSIX::remove" can remove empty directories.




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           o   "POSIX::setlocale" safer to call multiple times.

           o   "POSIX::SigRt" added, which provides access to
               POSIX realtime signal functionality on systems
               that support it.

       o   "re" upgraded to version 0.06_01

       o   "Safe" upgraded to version 2.16

       o   "Scalar::Util" upgraded to 1.19

       o   "SDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.06

       o   "SelfLoader" upgraded to version 1.17

       o   "Shell" upgraded to version 0.72

       o   "sigtrap" upgraded to version 1.04

       o   "Socket" upgraded to version 1.81

           o   this fixes an optimistic use of "gethostbyname"

       o   "Storable" upgraded to 2.19

       o   "Switch" upgraded to version 2.13

       o   "Sys::Syslog" upgraded to version 0.27

       o   "Term::ANSIColor" upgraded to version 1.12

       o   "Term::Cap" upgraded to version 1.12

       o   "Term::ReadLine" upgraded to version 1.03

       o   "Test::Builder" upgraded to version 0.80

       o   "Test::Harness" upgraded version to 2.64

           o   this makes it able to handle newlines.

       o   "Test::More" upgraded to version 0.80

       o   "Test::Simple" upgraded to version 0.80

       o   "Text::Balanced" upgraded to version 1.98

       o   "Text::ParseWords" upgraded to version 3.27

       o   "Text::Soundex" upgraded to version 3.03

       o   "Text::Tabs" upgraded to version 2007.1117




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       o   "Text::Wrap" upgraded to version 2006.1117

       o   "Thread" upgraded to version 2.01

       o   "Thread::Semaphore" upgraded to version 2.09

       o   "Thread::Queue" upgraded to version 2.11

           o   added capability to add complex structures (e.g.,
               hash of hashes) to queues.

           o   added capability to dequeue multiple items at
               once.

           o   added new methods to inspect and manipulate
               queues:  "peek", "insert" and "extract"

       o   "Tie::Handle" upgraded to version 4.2

       o   "Tie::Hash" upgraded to version 1.03

       o   "Tie::Memoize" upgraded to version 1.1

           o   "Tie::Memoize::EXISTS" now correctly caches its
               results.

       o   "Tie::RefHash" upgraded to version 1.38

       o   "Tie::Scalar" upgraded to version 1.01

       o   "Tie::StdHandle" upgraded to version 4.2

       o   "Time::gmtime" upgraded to version 1.03

       o   "Time::Local" upgraded to version 1.1901

       o   "Time::HiRes" upgraded to version 1.9715 with various
           build improvements (including VMS) and minor platform-
           specific bug fixes (including for HP-UX 11 ia64).

       o   "threads" upgraded to 1.71

           o   new thread state information methods:
               "is_running", "is_detached" and "is_joinable".
               "list" method enhanced to return running or
               joinable threads.

           o   new thread signal method: "kill"

           o   added capability to specify thread stack size.

           o   added capability to control thread exiting
               behavior.  Added a new "exit" method.




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       o   "threads::shared" upgraded to version 1.27

           o   smaller and faster implementation that eliminates
               one internal structure and the consequent level of
               indirection.

           o   user locks are now stored in a safer manner.

           o   new function "shared_clone" creates a copy of an
               object leaving shared elements as-is and deep-
               cloning non-shared elements.

           o   added new "is_shared" method.

       o   "Unicode::Normalize" upgraded to version 1.02

       o   "Unicode::UCD" upgraded to version 0.25

       o   "warnings" upgraded to version 1.05_01

       o   "Win32" upgraded to version 0.38

           o   added new function "GetCurrentProcessId" which
               returns the regular Windows process identifier of
               the current process, even when called from within
               a fork.

       o   "XSLoader" upgraded to version 0.10

       o   "XS::APItest" and "XS::Typemap" are for internal use
           only and hence no longer installed. Many more tests
           have been added to "XS::APItest".

Utility Changes
   debugger upgraded to version 1.31
       o   Andreas Koenig contributed two functions to save and
           load the debugger history.

       o   "NEXT::AUTOLOAD" no longer emits warnings under the
           debugger.

       o   The debugger should now correctly find tty the device
           on OS X 10.5 and VMS when the program "fork"s.

       o   LVALUE subs now work inside the debugger.

   perlthanks
       Perl 5.8.9 adds a new utility perlthanks, which is a
       variant of perlbug, but for sending non-bug-reports to the
       authors and maintainers of Perl.  Getting nothing but bug
       reports can become a bit demoralising - we'll see if this
       changes things.





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   perlbug
       perlbug now checks if you're reporting about a non-core
       module and suggests you report it to the CPAN author
       instead.

   h2xs
       o   won't define an empty string as a constant [RT #25366]

       o   has examples for "h2xs -X"

   h2ph
       o   now attempts to deal sensibly with the difference in
           path implications between "" and "<>" quoting in
           "#include" statements.

       o   now generates correct correct code for "#if defined A
           || defined B" [RT #39130]

New Documentation
       As usual, the documentation received its share of
       corrections, clarifications and other nitfixes. More ""
       tags were added for indexing.

       perlunitut is a tutorial written by Juerd Waalboer on
       Unicode-related terminology and how to correctly handle
       Unicode in Perl scripts.

       perlunicode is updated in section user defined properties.

       perluniintro has been updated in the example of detecting
       data that is not valid in particular encoding.

       perlcommunity provides an overview of the Perl Community
       along with further resources.

       CORE documents the pseudo-namespace for Perl's core
       routines.

Changes to Existing Documentation
       perlglossary adds deprecated modules and features and to
       be dropped modules.

       perlhack has been updated and added resources on smoke
       testing.

       The Perl FAQs (perlfaq1..perlfaq9) have been updated.

       perlcheat is updated with better details on "\w", "\d",
       and "\s".

       perldebug is updated with information on how to call the
       debugger.

       perldiag documentation updated with subroutine with an



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       ampersand on the argument to "exists" and "delete" and
       also several terminology updates on warnings.

       perlfork documents the limitation of "exec" inside pseudo-
       processes.

       perlfunc:

       o   Documentation is fixed in section "caller" and "pop".

       o   Function "alarm" now mentions "Time::HiRes::ualarm" in
           preference to "select".

       o   Regarding precedence in "-X", filetest operators are
           the same as unary operators, but not regarding parsing
           and parentheses (spotted by Eirik Berg Hanssen).

       o   reverse function documentation received scalar context
           examples.

       perllocale documentation is adjusted for number
       localization and "POSIX::setlocale" to fix Debian bug
       #379463.

       perlmodlib is updated with "CPAN::API::HOWTO" and
       "Sys::Syslog::win32::Win32"

       perlre documentation updated to reflect the differences
       between "[[:xxxxx:]]" and "\p{IsXxxxx}" matches. Also
       added section on "/g" and "/c" modifiers.

       perlreguts describe the internals of the regular
       expressions engine. It has been contributed by Yves Orton.

       perlrebackslash describes all perl regular expression
       backslash and escape sequences.

       perlrecharclass describes the syntax and use of character
       classes in Perl Regular Expressions.

       perlrun is updated to clarify on the hash seed
       PERL_HASH_SEED. Also more information in options "-x" and
       "-u".

       perlsub example is updated to use a lexical variable for
       "opendir" syntax.

       perlvar fixes confusion about real GID $( and effective
       GID $).

       Perl thread tutorial example is fixed in section "Queues:
       Passing Data Around" in perlthrtut and perlothrtut.

       perlhack documentation extensively improved by Jarkko



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       Hietaniemi and others.

       perltoot provides information on modifying
       @UNIVERSAL::ISA.

       perlport documentation extended to include different
       "kill(-9, ...)"  semantics on Windows. It also clearly
       states "dump" is not supported on Win32 and cygwin.

       INSTALL has been updated and modernised.

Performance Enhancements
       o   The default since perl 5.000 has been for perl to
           create an empty scalar with every new typeglob. The
           increased use of lexical variables means that most are
           now unused. Thanks to Nicholas Clark's efforts, Perl
           can now be compiled with "-DPERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV" to
           avoid creating these empty scalars.  This will
           significantly decrease the number of scalars allocated
           for all configurations, and the number of scalars that
           need to be copied for ithread creation. Whilst this
           option is binary compatible with existing perl
           installations, it does change a long-standing
           assumption about the internals, hence it is not
           enabled by default, as some third party code may rely
           on the old behaviour.

           We would recommend testing with this configuration on
           new deployments of perl, particularly for multi-
           threaded servers, to see whether all third party code
           is compatible with it, as this configuration may give
           useful performance improvements. For existing
           installations we would not recommend changing to this
           configuration unless thorough testing is performed
           before deployment.

       o   "diagnostics" no longer uses $&, which results in
           large speedups for regexp matching in all code using
           it.

       o   Regular expressions classes of a single character are
           now treated the same as if the character had been used
           as a literal, meaning that code that uses char-classes
           as an escaping mechanism will see a speedup. (Yves
           Orton)

       o   Creating anonymous array and hash references (ie. "[]"
           and "{}") now incurs no more overhead than creating an
           anonymous list or hash. Nicholas Clark provided
           changes with a saving of two ops and one stack push,
           which was measured as a slightly better than 5%
           improvement for these operations.

       o   Many calls to "strlen()" have been eliminated, either



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           because the length was already known, or by adopting
           or enhancing APIs that pass lengths. This has been
           aided by the adoption of a "my_sprintf()" wrapper,
           which returns the correct C89 value - the length of
           the formatted string. Previously we could not rely on
           the return value of "sprintf()", because on some
           ancient but extant platforms it still returns "char
           *".

       o   "index" is now faster if the search string is stored
           in UTF-8 but only contains characters in the Latin-1
           range.

       o   The Unicode swatch cache inside the regexp engine is
           now used. (the lookup had a key mismatch, present
           since the initial implementation). [RT #42839]

Installation and Configuration Improvements
   Relocatable installations
       There is now Configure support for creating a relocatable
       perl tree. If you Configure with "-Duserelocatableinc",
       then the paths in @INC (and everything else in %Config)
       can be optionally located via the path of the perl
       executable.

       At start time, if any paths in @INC or "Config" that
       Configure marked as relocatable (by starting them with
       ".../"), then they are prefixed the directory of $^X. This
       allows the relocation can be configured on a per-directory
       basis, although the default with "-Duserelocatableinc" is
       that everything is relocated. The initial install is done
       to the original configured prefix.

   Configuration improvements
       Configure is now better at removing temporary files. Tom
       Callaway (from RedHat) also contributed patches that
       complete the set of flags passed to the compiler and the
       linker, in particular that "-fPIC" is now enabled on
       Linux. It will also croak when your /dev/null isn't a
       device.

       A new configuration variable "d_pseudofork" has been to
       Configure, and is available as  $Config{d_pseudofork} in
       the "Config" module. This distinguishes real "fork"
       support from the pseudofork emulation used on Windows
       platforms.

       Config.pod and config.sh are now placed correctly for
       cross-compilation.

       $Config{useshrplib} is now 'true' rather than 'yes' when
       using a shared perl library.





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   Compilation improvements
       Parallel makes should work properly now, although there
       may still be problems if "make test" is instructed to run
       in parallel.

       Many compilation warnings have been cleaned up. A very
       stubborn compiler warning in "S_emulate_eaccess()" was
       killed after six attempts.  g++ support has been tuned,
       especially for FreeBSD.

       mkppport has been integrated, and all ppport.h files in
       the core will now be autogenerated at build time (and
       removed during cleanup).

   Installation improvements.
       installman now works with "-Duserelocatableinc" and
       "DESTDIR".

       installperl no longer installs:

       o   static library files of statically linked extensions
           when a shared perl library is being used. (They are
           not needed. See "Windows" below).

       o   SIGNATURE and PAUSE*.pub (CPAN files)

       o   NOTES and PATCHING (ExtUtils files)

       o   perlld and ld2 (Cygwin files)

   Platform Specific Changes
       There are improved hints for AIX, Cygwin, DEC/OSF,
       FreeBSD, HP/UX, Irix 6 Linux, MachTen, NetBSD, OS/390,
       QNX, SCO, Solaris, SunOS, System V Release 5.x (UnixWare
       7, OpenUNIX 8), Ultrix, UMIPS, uts and VOS.

       FreeBSD

       o   Drop "-std=c89" and "-ansi" if using "long long" as
           the main integral type, else in FreeBSD 6.2 (and
           perhaps other releases), system headers do not declare
           some functions required by perl.

       Solaris

       o   Starting with Solaris 10, we do not want versioned
           shared libraries, because those often indicate a
           private use only library. These problems could often
           be triggered when SUNWbdb (Berkeley DB) was installed.
           Hence if Solaris 10 is detected set
           "ignore_versioned_solibs=y".

       VMS




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       o   Allow IEEE math to be deselected on OpenVMS I64 (but
           it remains the default).

       o   Record IEEE usage in "config.h"

       o   Help older VMS compilers by using "ccflags" when
           building "munchconfig.exe".

       o   Don't try to build old "Thread" extension on VMS when
           "-Duseithreads" has been chosen.

       o   Passing a raw string of "NaN" to nawk causes a core
           dump - so the string has been changed to "*NaN*"

       o   t/op/stat.t tests will now test hard links on VMS if
           they are supported.

       Windows

       o   When using a shared perl library installperl no longer
           installs static library files, import library files
           and export library files (of statically linked
           extensions) and empty bootstrap files (of dynamically
           linked extensions). This fixes a problem building PAR-
           Packer on Win32 with a debug build of perl.

       o   Various improvements to the win32 build process,
           including support for Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
           (aka Visual C++ 8.x).

       o   perl.exe will now have an icon if built with MinGW or
           Borland.

       o   Improvements to the perl-static.exe build process.

       o   Add Win32 makefile option to link all extensions
           statically.

       o   The WinCE directory has been merged into the Win32
           directory.

       o   "setlocale" tests have been re-enabled for Windows XP
           onwards.

Selected Bug Fixes
   Unicode
       Many many bugs related to the internal Unicode
       implementation (UTF-8) have been fixed. In particular,
       long standing bugs related to returning Unicode via "tie",
       overloading or $@ are now gone, some of which were never
       reported.

       "unpack" will internally convert the string back from
       UTF-8 on numeric types.  This is a compromise between the



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       full consistency now in 5.10, and the current behaviour,
       which is often used as a "feature" on string types.

       Using ":crlf" and "UTF-16" IO layers together will now
       work.

       Fixed problems with "split", Unicode "/\s+/" and "/ \0/".

       Fixed bug RT #40641 - encoding of Unicode characters in
       regular expressions.

       Fixed a bug where using certain patterns in a regexp led
       to a panic.  [RT #45337]

       Perl no longer segfaults (due to infinite internal
       recursion) if the locale's character is not UTF-8 [RT
       #41442]:

           use open ':locale';
           print STDERR "\x{201e}"; # &bdquo;

   PerlIO
       Inconsistencies have been fixed in the reference counting
       PerlIO uses to keep track of Unix file descriptors, and
       the API used by XS code to manage getting and releasing
       "FILE *"s

   Magic
       Several bugs have been fixed in Magic, the internal system
       used to implement features such as "tie", tainting and
       threads sharing.

       "undef @array" on a tied array now correctly calls the
       "CLEAR" method.

       Some of the bitwise ops were not checking whether their
       arguments were magical before using them. [RT #24816]

       Magic is no longer invoked twice by the expression "\&$x"

       A bug with assigning large numbers and tainting has been
       resolved.  [RT #40708]

       A new entry has been added to the MAGIC vtable -
       "svt_local". This is used when copying magic to the new
       value during "local", allowing certain problems with
       localising shared variables to be resolved.

       For the implementation details, see "Magic Virtual Tables"
       in perlguts.

   Reblessing overloaded objects now works
       Internally, perl object-ness is on the referent, not the
       reference, even though methods can only be called via a



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       reference. However, the original implementation of
       overloading stored flags related to overloading on the
       reference, relying on the flags being copied when the
       reference was copied, or set at the creation of a new
       reference. This manifests in a bug - if you rebless an
       object from a class that has overloading, into one that
       does not, then any other existing references think that
       they (still) point to an overloaded object, choose these C
       code paths, and then throw errors.  Analogously, blessing
       into an overloaded class when other references exist will
       result in them not using overloading.

       The implementation has been fixed for 5.10, but this fix
       changes the semantics of flag bits, so is not binary
       compatible, so can't be applied to 5.8.9.  However, 5.8.9
       has a work-around that implements the same bug fix. If the
       referent has multiple references, then all the other
       references are located and corrected. A full search is
       avoided whenever possible by scanning lexicals outwards
       from the current subroutine, and the argument stack.

       A certain well known Linux vendor applied incomplete
       versions of this bug fix to their /usr/bin/perl and then
       prematurely closed bug reports about performance issues
       without consulting back upstream. This not being enough,
       they then proceeded to ignore the necessary fixes to these
       unreleased changes for 11 months, until massive pressure
       was applied by their long-suffering paying customers,
       catalysed by the failings being featured on a prominent
       blog and Slashdot.

   "strict" now propagates correctly into string evals
       Under 5.8.8 and earlier:

           $ perl5.8.8 -e 'use strict; eval "use foo bar" or die $@'
           Can't locate foo.pm in @INC (@INC contains: ... .) at (eval 1) line 2.
           BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 1) line 2.

       Under 5.8.9 and later:

           $ perl5.8.9 -e 'use strict; eval "use foo bar" or die $@'
           Bareword "bar" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at (eval 1) line 1.

       This may cause problems with programs that parse the error
       message and rely on the buggy behaviour.

   Other fixes
       o   The tokenizer no longer treats "=cute" (and other
           words beginning with "=cut") as a synonym for "=cut".

       o   Calling "CORE::require"

           "CORE::require" and "CORE::do" were always parsed as
           "require" and "do" when they were overridden. This is



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           now fixed.

       o   Stopped memory leak on long /etc/groups entries.

       o   "while (my $x ...) { ...; redo }" shouldn't "undef
           $x".

           In the presence of "my" in the conditional of a
           "while()", "until()", or "for(;;)" loop, we now add an
           extra scope to the body so that "redo" doesn't "undef"
           the lexical.

       o   The "encoding" pragma now correctly ignores anything
           following an "@" character in the "LC_ALL" and "LANG"
           environment variables. [RT # 49646]

       o   A segfault observed with some gcc 3.3 optimisations is
           resolved.

       o   A possible segfault when "unpack" used in scalar
           context with "()" groups is resolved. [RT #50256]

       o   Resolved issue where $! could be changed by a signal
           handler interrupting a "system" call.

       o   Fixed bug RT #37886, symbolic deferencing was allowed
           in the argument of "defined" even under the influence
           of "use strict 'refs'".

       o   Fixed bug RT #43207, where "lc"/"uc" inside "sort"
           affected the return value.

       o   Fixed bug RT #45607, where "*{"BONK"} = \&{"BONK"}"
           didn't work correctly.

       o   Fixed bug RT #35878, croaking from a XSUB called via
           "goto &xsub" corrupts perl internals.

       o   Fixed bug RT #32539, DynaLoader.o is moved into
           libperl.so to avoid the need to statically link
           DynaLoader into the stub perl executable. With this
           libperl.so provides everything needed to get a
           functional embedded perl interpreter to run.

       o   Fix bug RT #36267 so that assigning to a tied hash
           doesn't change the underlying hash.

       o   Fix bug RT #6006, regexp replaces using large
           replacement variables fail some of the time, i.e. when
           substitution contains something like "${10}" (note the
           bracket) instead of just $10.

       o   Fix bug RT #45053, "Perl_newCONSTSUB()" is now thread
           safe.



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   Platform Specific Fixes
       Darwin / MacOS X

       o   Various improvements to 64 bit builds.

       o   Mutex protection added in "PerlIOStdio_close()" to
           avoid race conditions.  Hopefully this fixes failures
           in the threads tests free.t and blocks.t.

       o   Added forked terminal support to the debugger, with
           the ability to update the window title.

       OS/2

       o   A build problem with specifying "USE_MULTI" and
           "USE_ITHREADS" but without "USE_IMP_SYS" has been
           fixed.

       o   "OS2::REXX" upgraded to version 1.04

       Tru64

       o   Aligned floating point build policies for cc and gcc.

       RedHat Linux

       o   Revisited a patch from 5.6.1 for RH7.2 for Intel's icc
           [RT #7916], added an additional check for
           $Config{gccversion}.

       Solaris/i386

       o   Use "-DPTR_IS_LONG" when using 64 bit integers

       VMS

       o   Fixed "PerlIO::Scalar" in-memory file record-style
           reads.

       o   pipe shutdown at process exit should now be more
           robust.

       o   Bugs in VMS exit handling tickled by "Test::Harness"
           2.64 have been fixed.

       o   Fix "fcntl()" locking capability test in
           configure.com.

       o   Replaced "shrplib='define'" with "useshrplib='true'"
           on VMS.

       Windows

       o   "File::Find" used to fail when the target directory is



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           a bare drive letter and "no_chdir" is 1 (the default
           is 0). [RT #41555]

       o   A build problem with specifying "USE_MULTI" and
           "USE_ITHREADS" but without "USE_IMP_SYS" has been
           fixed.

       o   The process id is no longer truncated to 16 bits on
           some Windows platforms (
           http://bugs.activestate.com/show_bug.cgi?id=72443 )

       o   Fixed bug RT #54828 in perlio.c where calling
           "binmode" on Win32 and Cgywin may cause a segmentation
           fault.

   Smaller fixes
       o   It is now possible to overload "eq" when using
           "nomethod".

       o   Various problems using "overload" with 64 bit integers
           corrected.

       o   The reference count of "PerlIO" file descriptors is
           now correctly handled.

       o   On VMS, escaped dots will be preserved when converted
           to UNIX syntax.

       o   "keys %+" no longer throws an 'ambiguous' warning.

       o   Using "#!perl -d" could trigger an assertion, which
           has been fixed.

       o   Don't stringify tied code references in @INC when
           calling "require".

       o   Code references in @INC report the correct file name
           when "__FILE__" is used.

       o   Width and precision in sprintf didn't handle
           characters above 255 correctly.  [RT #40473]

       o   List slices with indices out of range now work more
           consistently.  [RT #39882]

       o   A change introduced with perl 5.8.1 broke the parsing
           of arguments of the form "-foo=bar" with the "-s" on
           the <#!> line. This has been fixed. See
           http://bugs.activestate.com/show_bug.cgi?id=43483

       o   "tr///" is now threadsafe. Previously it was storing a
           swash inside its OP, rather than in a pad.

       o   pod2html labels anchors more consistently and handles



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           nested definition lists better.

       o   "threads" cleanup veto has been extended to include
           "perl_free()" and "perl_destruct()"

       o   On some systems, changes to $ENV{TZ} would not always
           be respected by the underlying calls to
           "localtime_r()".  Perl now forces the inspection of
           the environment on these systems.

       o   The special variable $^R is now more consistently set
           when executing regexps using the "(?{...})" construct.
           In particular, it will still be set even if
           backreferences or optional sub-patterns "(?:...)?" are
           used.

New or Changed Diagnostics
   panic: sv_chop %s
       This new fatal error occurs when the C routine
       "Perl_sv_chop()" was passed a position that is not within
       the scalar's string buffer. This is caused by buggy XS
       code, and at this point recovery is not possible.

   Maximal count of pending signals (%s) exceeded
       This new fatal error occurs when the perl process has to
       abort due to too many pending signals, which is bound to
       prevent perl from being able to handle further incoming
       signals safely.

   panic: attempt to call %s in %s
       This new fatal error occurs when the ACL version file test
       operator is used where it is not available on the current
       platform. Earlier checks mean that it should never be
       possible to get this.

   FETCHSIZE returned a negative value
       New error indicating that a tied array has claimed to have
       a negative number of elements.

   Can't upgrade %s (%d) to %d
       Previously the internal error from the SV upgrade code was
       the less informative Can't upgrade that kind of scalar. It
       now reports the current internal type, and the new type
       requested.

   %s argument is not a HASH or ARRAY element or a subroutine
       This error, thrown if an invalid argument is provided to
       "exists" now correctly includes "or a subroutine". [RT
       #38955]

   Cannot make the non-overridable builtin %s fatal
       This error in "Fatal" previously did not show the name of
       the builtin in question (now represented by %s above).




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   Unrecognized character '%s' in column %d
       This error previously did not state the column.

   Offset outside string
       This can now also be generated by a "seek" on a file
       handle using "PerlIO::scalar".

   Invalid escape in the specified encoding in regexp; marked by
       <-- HERE in m/%s/
       New error, introduced as part of the fix to RT #40641 to
       handle encoding of Unicode characters in regular
       expression comments.

   Your machine doesn't support dump/undump.
       A more informative fatal error issued when calling "dump"
       on Win32 and Cygwin. (Given that the purpose of "dump" is
       to abort with a core dump, and core dumps can't be
       produced on these platforms, this is more useful than
       silently exiting.)

Changed Internals
       The perl sources can now be compiled with a C++ compiler
       instead of a C compiler. A necessary implementation
       details is that under C++, the macro "XS" used to define
       XSUBs now includes an "extern "C"" definition. A side
       effect of this is that C++ code that used the construction

           typedef XS(SwigPerlWrapper);

       now needs to be written

           typedef XSPROTO(SwigPerlWrapper);

       using the new "XSPROTO" macro, in order to compile. C
       extensions are unaffected, although C extensions are
       encouraged to use "XSPROTO" too.  This change was present
       in the 5.10.0 release of perl, so any actively maintained
       code that happened to use this construction should already
       have been adapted. Code that needs changing will fail with
       a compilation error.

       "set" magic on localizing/assigning to a magic variable
       will now only trigger for container magics, i.e. it will
       for %ENV or %SIG but not for $#array.

       The new API macro "newSVpvs()" can be used in place of
       constructions such as "newSVpvn("ISA", 3)". It takes a
       single string constant, and at C compile time determines
       its length.

       The new API function "Perl_newSV_type()" can be used as a
       more efficient replacement of the common idiom





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           sv = newSV(0);
           sv_upgrade(sv, type);

       Similarly "Perl_newSVpvn_flags()" can be used to combine
       "Perl_newSVpv()" with "Perl_sv_2mortal()" or the
       equivalent "Perl_sv_newmortal()" with "Perl_sv_setpvn()"

       Two new macros "mPUSHs()" and "mXPUSHs()" are added, to
       make it easier to push mortal SVs onto the stack. They
       were then used to fix several bugs where values on the
       stack had not been mortalised.

       A "Perl_signbit()" function was added to test the sign of
       an "NV". It maps to the system one when available.

       "Perl_av_reify()", "Perl_lex_end()", "Perl_mod()",
       "Perl_op_clear()", "Perl_pop_return()", "Perl_qerror()",
       "Perl_setdefout()", "Perl_vivify_defelem()" and
       "Perl_yylex()" are now visible to extensions.  This was
       required to allow "Data::Alias" to work on Windows.

       "Perl_find_runcv()" is now visible to perl core
       extensions. This was required to allow "Sub::Current" to
       work on Windows.

       "ptr_table*" functions are now available in unthreaded
       perl. "Storable" takes advantage of this.

       There have been many small cleanups made to the internals.
       In particular, "Perl_sv_upgrade()" has been simplified
       considerably, with a straight-through code path that uses
       "memset()" and "memcpy()" to initialise the new body,
       rather than assignment via multiple temporary variables.
       It has also benefited from simplification and de-
       duplication of the arena management code.

       A lot of small improvements in the code base were made due
       to reports from the Coverity static code analyzer.

       Corrected use and documentation of "Perl_gv_stashpv()",
       "Perl_gv_stashpvn()", "Perl_gv_stashsv()" functions (last
       parameter is a bitmask, not boolean).

       "PERL_SYS_INIT", "PERL_SYS_INIT3" and "PERL_SYS_TERM"
       macros have been changed into functions.

       "PERLSYS_TERM" no longer requires a context.
       "PerlIO_teardown()" is now called without a context, and
       debugging output in this function has been disabled
       because that required that an interpreter was present, an
       invalid assumption at termination time.

       All compile time options which affect binary compatibility
       have been grouped together into a global variable



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       ("PL_bincompat_options").

       The values of "PERL_REVISION", "PERL_VERSION" and
       "PERL_SUBVERSION" are now baked into global variables (and
       hence into any shared perl library).  Additionally under
       "MULTIPLICITY", the perl executable now records the size
       of the interpreter structure (total, and for this
       version). Coupled with "PL_bincompat_options" this will
       allow 5.8.10 (and later), when compiled with a shared perl
       library, to perform sanity checks in "main()" to verify
       that the shared library is indeed binary compatible.

       Symbolic references can now have embedded NULs. The new
       public function "Perl_get_cvn_flags()" can be used in
       extensions if you have to handle them.

   Macro cleanups
       The core code, and XS code in ext that is not dual-lived
       on CPAN, no longer uses the macros "PL_na", "NEWSV()",
       "Null()", "Nullav", "Nullcv", "Nullhv", "Nullhv" etc.
       Their use is discouraged in new code, particularly
       "PL_na", which is a small performance hit.

New Tests
       Many modules updated from CPAN incorporate new tests. Some
       core specific tests have been added:

       ext/DynaLoader/t/DynaLoader.t
           Tests for the "DynaLoader" module.

       t/comp/fold.t
           Tests for compile-time constant folding.

       t/io/pvbm.t
           Tests incorporated from 5.10.0 which check that there
           is no unexpected interaction between the internal
           types "PVBM" and "PVGV".

       t/lib/proxy_constant_subs.t
           Tests for the new form of constant subroutines.

       t/op/attrhand.t
           Tests for "Attribute::Handlers".

       t/op/dbm.t
           Tests for "dbmopen".

       t/op/inccode-tie.t
           Calls all tests in t/op/inccode.t after first tying
           @INC.

       t/op/incfilter.t
           Tests for for source filters returned from code
           references in @INC.



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       t/op/kill0.t
           Tests for RT #30970.

       t/op/qrstack.t
           Tests for RT #41484.

       t/op/qr.t
           Tests for the "qr//" construct.

       t/op/regexp_qr_embed.t
           Tests for the "qr//" construct within another regexp.

       t/op/regexp_qr.t
           Tests for the "qr//" construct.

       t/op/rxcode.t
           Tests for RT #32840.

       t/op/studytied.t
           Tests for "study" on tied scalars.

       t/op/substT.t
           Tests for "subst" run under "-T" mode.

       t/op/symbolcache.t
           Tests for "undef" and "delete" on stash entries that
           are bound to subroutines or methods.

       t/op/upgrade.t
           Tests for "Perl_sv_upgrade()".

       t/mro/package_aliases.t
           MRO tests for "isa" and package aliases.

       t/pod/twice.t
           Tests for calling "Pod::Parser" twice.

       t/run/cloexec.t
           Tests for inheriting file descriptors across "exec"
           (close-on-exec).

       t/uni/cache.t
           Tests for the UTF-8 caching code.

       t/uni/chr.t
           Test that strange encodings do not upset
           "Perl_pp_chr()".

       t/uni/greek.t
           Tests for RT #40641.

       t/uni/latin2.t
           Tests for RT #40641.




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       t/uni/overload.t
           Tests for returning Unicode from overloaded values.

       t/uni/tie.t
           Tests for returning Unicode from tied variables.

Known Problems
       There are no known new bugs.

       However, programs that rely on bugs that have been fixed
       will have problems.  Also, many bug fixes present in
       5.10.0 can't be back-ported to the 5.8.x branch, because
       they require changes that are binary incompatible, or
       because the code changes are too large and hence too risky
       to incorporate.

       We have only limited volunteer labour, and the maintenance
       burden is getting increasingly complex. Hence this will be
       the last significant release of the 5.8.x series. Any
       future releases of 5.8.x will likely only be to deal with
       security issues, and platform build failures. Hence you
       should look to migrating to 5.10.x, if you have not
       started already. Alternatively, if business requirements
       constrain you to continue to use 5.8.x, you may wish to
       consider commercial support from firms such as
       ActiveState.

Platform Specific Notes
   Win32
       "readdir()", "cwd()", $^X and @INC now use the alternate
       (short) filename if the long name is outside the current
       codepage (Jan Dubois).

       Updated Modules

       o   "Win32" upgraded to version 0.38. Now has a documented
           'WinVista' response from "GetOSName" and support for
           Vista's privilege elevation in "IsAdminUser".  Support
           for Unicode characters in path names. Improved cygwin
           and Win64 compatibility.

       o   "Win32API" updated to 0.1001_01

       o   "killpg()" support added to "MSWin32" (Jan Dubois).

       o   "File::Spec::Win32" upgraded to version 3.2701

   OS/2
       Updated Modules

       o   "OS2::Process" upgraded to 1.03

           Ilya Zakharevich has added and documented several
           "Window*" and "Clipbrd*" functions.



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       o   "OS2::REXX::DLL", "OS2::REXX" updated to version 1.03

   VMS
       Updated Modules

       o   "DCLsym" upgraded to version 1.03

       o   "Stdio" upgraded to version 2.4

       o   "VMS::XSSymSet" upgraded to 1.1.

Obituary
       Nick Ing-Simmons, long time Perl hacker, author of the
       "Tk" and "Encode" modules, perlio.c in the core, and
       5.003_02 pumpking, died of a heart attack on 25th
       September 2006. He will be missed.

Acknowledgements
       Some of the work in this release was funded by a TPF
       grant.

       Steve Hay worked behind the scenes working out the causes
       of the differences between core modules, their CPAN
       releases, and previous core releases, and the best way to
       rectify them. He doesn't want to do it again. I know this
       feeling, and I'm very glad he did it this time, instead of
       me.

       Paul Fenwick assembled a team of 18 volunteers, who broke
       the back of writing this document. In particular, Bradley
       Dean, Eddy Tan, and Vincent Pit provided half the team's
       contribution.

       Schwern verified the list of updated module versions,
       correcting quite a few errors that I (and everyone else)
       had missed, both wrongly stated module versions, and
       changed modules that had not been listed.

       The crack Berlin-based QA team of Andreas Koenig and
       Slaven Rezic tirelessly re-built snapshots, tested most
       everything CPAN against them, and then identified the
       changes responsible for any module regressions, ensuring
       that several show-stopper bugs were stomped before the
       first release candidate was cut.

       The other core committers contributed most of the changes,
       and applied most of the patches sent in by the hundreds of
       contributors listed in AUTHORS.

       And obviously, Larry Wall, without whom we wouldn't have
       Perl.

Reporting Bugs
       If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the



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       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/

       If the bug you are reporting has security implications,
       which make it inappropriate to send to a publicly archived
       mailing list, then please send it to
       perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed
       subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all
       the core committers, who be able to help assess the impact
       of issues, figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate
       the release of patches to mitigate or fix the problem
       across all platforms on which Perl is supported. Please
       only use this address for security issues in the Perl
       core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.

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.
























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