


PERL587DELTA(1)  Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL587DELTA(1)


NAME
       perl587delta - what is new for perl v5.8.7

DESCRIPTION
       This document describes differences between the 5.8.6
       release and the 5.8.7 release.

Incompatible Changes
       There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.6.

Core Enhancements
   Unicode Character Database 4.1.0
       The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in
       Perl 5.8 has been updated to 4.1.0 from 4.0.1. See
       <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.1.0/#NotableChanges>
       for the notable changes.

   suidperl less insecure
       A pair of exploits in "suidperl" involving debugging code
       have been closed.

       For new projects the core perl team strongly recommends
       that you use dedicated, single purpose security tools such
       as "sudo" in preference to "suidperl".

   Optional site customization script
       The perl interpreter can be built to allow the use of a
       site customization script. By default this is not enabled,
       to be consistent with previous perl releases. To use this,
       add "-Dusesitecustomize" to the command line flags when
       running the "Configure" script. See also "-f" in perlrun.

   "Config.pm" is now much smaller.
       "Config.pm" is now about 3K rather than 32K, with the
       infrequently used code and %Config values loaded on
       demand. This is transparent to the programmer, but means
       that most code will save parsing and loading 29K of script
       (for example, code that uses "File::Find").

Modules and Pragmata
       o   B upgraded to version 1.09

       o   base upgraded to version 2.07

       o   bignum upgraded to version 0.17

       o   bytes upgraded to version 1.02

       o   Carp upgraded to version 1.04

       o   CGI upgraded to version 3.10

       o   Class::ISA upgraded to version 0.33




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       o   Data::Dumper upgraded to version 2.121_02

       o   DB_File upgraded to version 1.811

       o   Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.06

       o   Digest upgraded to version 1.10

       o   Encode upgraded to version 2.10

       o   FileCache upgraded to version 1.05

       o   File::Path upgraded to version 1.07

       o   File::Temp upgraded to version 0.16

       o   IO::File upgraded to version 1.11

       o   IO::Socket upgraded to version 1.28

       o   Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.77

       o   Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.15

       o   overload upgraded to version 1.03

       o   PathTools upgraded to version 3.05

       o   Pod::HTML upgraded to version 1.0503

       o   Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.14

       o   Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.58

       o   Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.30

       o   Symbol upgraded to version 1.06

       o   Term::ANSIColor upgraded to version 1.09

       o   Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.48

       o   Test::Simple upgraded to version 0.54

       o   Text::Wrap upgraded to version 2001.09293, to fix a
           bug when wrap() was called with a non-space separator.

       o   threads::shared upgraded to version 0.93

       o   Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.66

       o   Time::Local upgraded to version 1.11

       o   Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.32



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       o   utf8 upgraded to version 1.05

       o   Win32 upgraded to version 0.24, which provides
           Win32::GetFileVersion

Utility Changes
   find2perl enhancements
       "find2perl" has new options "-iname", "-path" and
       "-ipath".

Performance Enhancements
       The internal pointer mapping hash used during ithreads
       cloning now uses an arena for memory allocation. In tests
       this reduced ithreads cloning time by about 10%.

Installation and Configuration Improvements
       o   The Win32 "dmake" makefile.mk has been updated to make
           it compatible with the latest versions of dmake.

       o   "PERL_MALLOC", "DEBUG_MSTATS",
           "PERL_HASH_SEED_EXPLICIT" and "NO_HASH_SEED" should
           now work in Win32 makefiles.

Selected Bug Fixes
       o   The socket() function on Win32 has been fixed so that
           it is able to use transport providers which specify a
           protocol of 0 (meaning any protocol is allowed) once
           more.  (This was broken in 5.8.6, and typically caused
           the use of ICMP sockets to fail.)

       o   Another obscure bug involving "substr" and UTF-8
           caused by bad internal offset caching has been
           identified and fixed.

       o   A bug involving the loading of UTF-8 tables by the
           regexp engine has been fixed - code such as ""\x{100}"
           =~ /[[:print:]]/" will no longer give corrupt results.

       o   Case conversion operations such as "uc" on a long
           Unicode string could exhaust memory. This has been
           fixed.

       o   "index"/"rindex" were buggy for some combinations of
           Unicode and non-Unicode data. This has been fixed.

       o   "read" (and presumably "sysread") would expose the
           UTF-8 internals when reading from a byte oriented file
           handle into a UTF-8 scalar. This has been fixed.

       o   Several "pack"/"unpack" bug fixes:

           o   Checksums with "b" or "B" formats were broken.

           o   "unpack" checksums could overflow with the "C"



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               format.

           o   "U0" and "C0" are now scoped to "()" "pack" sub-
               templates.

           o   Counted length prefixes now don't change "C0"/"U0"
               mode.

           o   "pack" "Z0" used to destroy the preceding
               character.

           o   "P"/"p" "pack" formats used to only recognise
               literal "undef"

       o   Using closures with ithreads could cause perl to
           crash. This was due to failure to correctly lock
           internal OP structures, and has been fixed.

       o   The return value of "close" now correctly reflects any
           file errors that occur while flushing the handle's
           data, instead of just giving failure if the actual
           underlying file close operation failed.

       o   "not() || 1" used to segfault. "not()" now behaves
           like not(0), which was the pre 5.6.0 behaviour.

       o   "h2ph" has various enhancements to cope with
           constructs in header files that used to result in
           incorrect or invalid output.

New or Changed Diagnostics
       There is a new taint error, "%ENV is aliased to %s". This
       error is thrown when taint checks are enabled and when
       *ENV has been aliased, so that %ENV has no env-magic
       anymore and hence the environment cannot be verified as
       taint-free.

       The internals of "pack" and "unpack" have been updated.
       All legitimate templates should work as before, but there
       may be some changes in the error reported for complex
       failure cases. Any behaviour changes for non-error cases
       are bugs, and should be reported.

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 5.8.6, and hopefully
       faster in some cases, but apart from this there should be
       no user-detectable changes.

       "${^UTF8LOCALE}" has been added to give perl space access
       to "PL_utf8locale".




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       The size of the arenas used to allocate SV heads and most
       SV bodies can now be changed at compile time. The old size
       was 1008 bytes, the new default size is 4080 bytes.

Known Problems
       Unicode strings returned from overloaded operators can be
       buggy. This is a long standing bug reported since 5.8.6
       was released, but we do not yet have a suitable fix for
       it.

Platform Specific Problems
       On UNICOS, lib/Math/BigInt/t/bigintc.t hangs burning CPU.
       ext/B/t/bytecode.t and ext/Socket/t/socketpair.t both fail
       tests.  These are unlikely to be resolved, as our valiant
       UNICOS porter's last Cray is being decommissioned.

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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