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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
       o   "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.

Modules and Pragmata
       o   "Attribute::Handlers" upgraded to version 0.78_02

           o   Documentation typo fix

       o   "attrs" upgraded to version 1.02

           o   Internal cleanup only

       o   "autouse" upgraded to version 1.05

           o   Simplified implementation

       o   "B" upgraded to version 1.09_01

           o   The inheritance hierarchy of the "B::" modules has
               been corrected; "B::NV" now inherits from "B::SV"
               (instead of "B::IV").

       o   "blib" upgraded to version 1.03

           o   Documentation typo fix

       o   "ByteLoader" upgraded to version 0.06

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "CGI" upgraded to version 3.15

           o   Extraneous "?" from "self_url()" removed

           o   "scrolling_list()" select attribute fixed

           o   "virtual_port" now works properly with the https
               protocol




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           o   "upload_hook()" and "append()" now works in
               function-oriented mode

           o   "POST_MAX" doesn't cause the client to hang any
               more

           o   Automatic tab indexes are now disabled and new
               "-tabindex" pragma has been added to turn
               automatic indexes back on

           o   "end_form()" doesn't emit empty (and non-
               validating) "<div>"

           o   "CGI::Carp" works better in certain mod_perl
               configurations

           o   Setting $CGI::TMPDIRECTORY is now effective

           o   Enhanced documentation

       o   "charnames" upgraded to version 1.05

           o   "viacode()" now accept hex strings and has been
               optimized.

       o   "CPAN" upgraded to version 1.76_02

           o   1 minor bug fix for Win32

       o   "Cwd" upgraded to version 3.12

           o   "canonpath()" on Win32 now collapses foo\..
               sections correctly.

           o   Improved behaviour on Symbian OS.

           o   Enhanced documentation and typo fixes

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "Data::Dumper" upgraded to version 2.121_08

           o   A problem where "Data::Dumper" would sometimes
               update the iterator state of hashes has been fixed

           o   Numeric labels now work

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "DB" upgraded to version 1.01

           o   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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       o   "DB_File" upgraded to version 1.814

           o   Adds support for Berkeley DB 4.4.

       o   "Devel::DProf" upgraded to version 20050603.00

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "Devel::Peek" upgraded to version 1.03

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "Devel::PPPort" upgraded to version 3.06_01

           o   "--compat-version" argument checking has been
               improved

           o   Files passed on the command line are filtered by
               default

           o   "--nofilter" option to override the filtering has
               been added

           o   Enhanced documentation

       o   "diagnostics" upgraded to version 1.15

           o   Documentation typo fix

       o   "Digest" upgraded to version 1.14

           o   The constructor now knows which module implements
               SHA-224

           o   Documentation tweaks and typo fixes

       o   "Digest::MD5" upgraded to version 2.36

           o   "XSLoader" is now used for faster loading

           o   Enhanced documentation including MD5 weaknesses
               discovered lately

       o   "Dumpvalue" upgraded to version 1.12

           o   Documentation fix

       o   "DynaLoader" upgraded but unfortunately we're not able
           to increment its version number :-(

           o   Implements "dl_unload_file" on Win32

           o   Internal cleanup




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           o   "XSLoader" 0.06 incorporated; small optimisation
               for calling "bootstrap_inherit()" and
               documentation enhancements.

       o   "Encode" upgraded to version 2.12

           o   A coderef is now acceptable for "CHECK"!

           o   3 new characters added to the ISO-8859-7 encoding

           o   New encoding "MIME-Header-ISO_2022_JP" added

           o   Problem with partial characters and
               "encoding(utf-8-strict)" fixed.

           o   Documentation enhancements and typo fixes

       o   "English" upgraded to version 1.02

           o   the $COMPILING variable has been added

       o   "ExtUtils::Constant" upgraded to version 0.17

           o   Improved compatibility with older versions of perl

       o   "ExtUtils::MakeMaker" upgraded to version 6.30 (was
           6.17)

           o   Too much to list here;  see
               <http://search.cpan.org/src/MSCHWERN/ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.30/Changes>

       o   "File::Basename" upgraded to version 2.74, with
           changes contributed by Michael Schwern.

           o   Documentation clarified and errors corrected.

           o   "basename" now strips trailing path separators
               before processing the name.

           o   "basename" now returns "/" for parameter "/", to
               make "basename" consistent with the shell utility
               of the same name.

           o   The suffix is no longer stripped if it is
               identical to the remaining characters in the name,
               again for consistency with the shell utility.

           o   Some internal code cleanup.

       o   "File::Copy" upgraded to version 2.09

           o   Copying a file onto itself used to fail.

           o   Moving a file between file systems now preserves



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               the access and modification time stamps

       o   "File::Find" upgraded to version 1.10

           o   Win32 portability fixes

           o   Enhanced documentation

       o   "File::Glob" upgraded to version 1.05

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "File::Path" upgraded to version 1.08

           o   "mkpath" now preserves "errno" when "mkdir" fails

       o   "File::Spec" upgraded to version 3.12

           o   "File::Spec-"rootdir()> now returns "\" on Win32,
               instead of "/"

           o   $^O could sometimes become tainted. This has been
               fixed.

           o   "canonpath" on Win32 now collapses "foo/.." (or
               "foo\..") sections correctly, rather than doing
               the "misguided" work it was previously doing.
               Note that "canonpath" on Unix still does not
               collapse these sections, as doing so would be
               incorrect.

           o   Some documentation improvements

           o   Some internal code cleanup

       o   "FileCache" upgraded to version 1.06

           o   POD formatting errors in the documentation fixed

       o   "Filter::Simple" upgraded to version 0.82

       o   "FindBin" upgraded to version 1.47

           o   Now works better with directories where access
               rights are more restrictive than usual.

       o   "GDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.08

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "Getopt::Long" upgraded to version 2.35

           o   "prefix_pattern" has now been complemented by a
               new configuration option "long_prefix_pattern"



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               that allows the user to specify what prefix
               patterns should have long option style semantics
               applied.

           o   Options can now take multiple values at once
               (experimental)

           o   Various bug fixes

       o   "if" upgraded to version 0.05

           o   Give more meaningful error messages from "if" when
               invoked with a condition in list context.

           o   Restore backwards compatibility with earlier
               versions of perl

       o   "IO" upgraded to version 1.22

           o   Enhanced documentation

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "IPC::Open2" upgraded to version 1.02

           o   Enhanced documentation

       o   "IPC::Open3" upgraded to version 1.02

           o   Enhanced documentation

       o   "List::Util" upgraded to version 1.18 (was 1.14)

           o   Fix pure-perl version of "refaddr" to avoid
               blessing an un-blessed reference

           o   Use "XSLoader" for faster loading

           o   Fixed various memory leaks

           o   Internal cleanup and portability fixes

       o   "Math::Complex" upgraded to version 1.35

           o   "atan2(0, i)" now works, as do all the
               (computable) complex argument cases

           o   Fixes for certain bugs in "make" and "emake"

           o   Support returning the kth root directly

           o   Support "[2,-3pi/8]" in "emake"

           o   Support "inf" for "make"/"emake"



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           o   Document "make"/"emake" more visibly

       o   "Math::Trig" upgraded to version 1.03

           o   Add more great circle routines:
               "great_circle_waypoint" and
               "great_circle_destination"

       o   "MIME::Base64" upgraded to version 3.07

           o   Use "XSLoader" for faster loading

           o   Enhanced documentation

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "NDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.06

           o   Enhanced documentation

       o   "ODBM_File" upgraded to version 1.06

           o   Documentation typo fixed

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "Opcode" upgraded to version 1.06

           o   Enhanced documentation

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "open" upgraded to version 1.05

           o   Enhanced documentation

       o   "overload" upgraded to version 1.04

           o   Enhanced documentation

       o   "PerlIO" upgraded to version 1.04

           o   "PerlIO::via" iterate over layers properly now

           o   "PerlIO::scalar" understands "$/ = """ now

           o   "encoding(utf-8-strict)" with partial characters
               now works

           o   Enhanced documentation

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "Pod::Functions" upgraded to version 1.03



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           o   Documentation typos fixed

       o   "Pod::Html" upgraded to version 1.0504

           o   HTML output will now correctly link to "=item"s on
               the same page, and should be valid XHTML.

           o   Variable names are recognized as intended

           o   Documentation typos fixed

       o   "Pod::Parser" upgraded to version 1.32

           o   Allow files that start with "=head" on the first
               line

           o   Win32 portability fix

           o   Exit status of "pod2usage" fixed

           o   New "-noperldoc" switch for "pod2usage"

           o   Arbitrary URL schemes now allowed

           o   Documentation typos fixed

       o   "POSIX" upgraded to version 1.09

           o   Documentation typos fixed

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "re" upgraded to version 0.05

           o   Documentation typo fixed

       o   "Safe" upgraded to version 2.12

           o   Minor documentation enhancement

       o   "SDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.05

           o   Documentation typo fixed

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "Socket" upgraded to version 1.78

           o   Internal cleanup

       o   "Storable" upgraded to version 2.15

           o   This includes the "STORABLE_attach" hook
               functionality added by Adam Kennedy, and more



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               frugal memory requirements when storing under
               "ithreads", by using the "ithreads" cloning
               tracking code.

       o   "Switch" upgraded to version 2.10_01

           o   Documentation typos fixed

       o   "Sys::Syslog" upgraded to version 0.13

           o   Now provides numeric macros and meaningful
               "Exporter" tags.

           o   No longer uses "Sys::Hostname" as it may provide
               useless values in unconfigured network
               environments, so instead uses "INADDR_LOOPBACK"
               directly.

           o   "syslog()" now uses local timestamp.

           o   "setlogmask()" now behaves like its C counterpart.

           o   "setlogsock()" will now "croak()" as documented.

           o   Improved error and warnings messages.

           o   Improved documentation.

       o   "Term::ANSIColor" upgraded to version 1.10

           o   Fixes a bug in "colored" when $EACHLINE is set
               that caused it to not color lines consisting
               solely of 0 (literal zero).

           o   Improved tests.

       o   "Term::ReadLine" upgraded to version 1.02

           o   Documentation tweaks

       o   "Test::Harness" upgraded to version 2.56 (was 2.48)

           o   The "Test::Harness" timer is now off by default.

           o   Now shows elapsed time in milliseconds.

           o   Various bug fixes

       o   "Test::Simple" upgraded to version 0.62 (was 0.54)

           o   "is_deeply()" no longer fails to work for many
               cases

           o   Various minor bug fixes



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           o   Documentation enhancements

       o   "Text::Tabs" upgraded to version 2005.0824

           o   Provides a faster implementation of "expand"

       o   "Text::Wrap" upgraded to version 2005.082401

           o   Adds $Text::Wrap::separator2, which allows you to
               preserve existing newlines but add line-breaks
               with some other string.

       o   "threads" upgraded to version 1.07

           o   "threads" will now honour "no warnings 'threads'"

           o   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)

           o   Some documentation typo fixes.

       o   "threads::shared" upgraded to version 0.94

           o   Documentation changes only

           o   Note: An improved implementation of
               "threads::shared" is available on CPAN - this will
               be merged into 5.8.9 if it proves stable.

       o   "Tie::Hash" upgraded to version 1.02

           o   Documentation typo fixed

       o   "Time::HiRes" upgraded to version 1.86 (was 1.66)

           o   "clock_nanosleep()" and "clock()" functions added

           o   Support for the POSIX "clock_gettime()" and
               "clock_getres()" has been added

           o   Return "undef" or an empty list if the C
               "gettimeofday()" function fails

           o   Improved "nanosleep" detection

           o   Internal cleanup

           o   Enhanced documentation

       o   "Unicode::Collate" upgraded to version 0.52

           o   Now implements UCA Revision 14 (based on Unicode



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               4.1.0).

           o   "Unicode::Collate-"new> method no longer
               overwrites user's $_

           o   Enhanced documentation

       o   "Unicode::UCD" upgraded to version 0.24

           o   Documentation typos fixed

       o   "User::grent" upgraded to version 1.01

           o   Documentation typo fixed

       o   "utf8" upgraded to version 1.06

           o   Documentation typos fixed

       o   "vmsish" upgraded to version 1.02

           o   Documentation typos fixed

       o   "warnings" upgraded to version 1.05

           o   Gentler messing with "Carp::" internals

           o   Internal cleanup

           o   Documentation update

       o   "Win32" upgraded to version 0.2601

           o   Provides Windows Vista support to
               "Win32::GetOSName"

           o   Documentation enhancements

       o   "XS::Typemap" upgraded to version 0.02

           o   Internal cleanup

Utility Changes
   "h2xs" 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.

   "perlivp" enhancements
       "perlivp" implements new option "-a" and will not check



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       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
       o   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.

       o   Salvador Fandin~o provided improvements to reduce the
           memory usage of "sort" and to speed up some cases.

       o   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.

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



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       "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.

   sprintf() 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
       o   "FindBin" now works better with directories where
           access rights are more restrictive than usual.

       o   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.

       o   Trailing spaces are now trimmed from $! and $^E.

       o   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.

       o   "PerlIO::scalar" now works better with non-default $/
           settings.

       o   You can now use the "x" operator to repeat a "qw//"
           list. This used to raise a syntax error.




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       o   The debugger now traces correctly execution in
           eval("")uated code that contains #line directives.

       o   The value of the "open" pragma is no longer ignored
           for three-argument opens.

       o   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.

       o   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.

       o   "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.

       o   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.

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.




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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:



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           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.



























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