History-ChangesWhat is new for perl v5.8.8Daftar Isi NAMEperl588delta - what is new for perl v5.8.8 DESCRIPTIONThis document describes differences between the 5.8.7 release andthe 5.8.8 release. Incompatible ChangesThere are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.8.7. If any exist,they are bugs and reports are welcome. Core Enhancementschdir, chmod and chown can now work on filehandles as well asfilenames, if the system supports respectively fchdir, fchmod andfchown, thanks to a patch provided by Gisle Aas.
Modules and PragmataAttribute::Handlers upgraded to version 0.78_02
attrs upgraded to version 1.02
autouse upgraded to version 1.05
B upgraded to version 1.09_01
blib upgraded to version 1.03
ByteLoader upgraded to version 0.06
CGI upgraded to version 3.15
Extraneous "?" from self_url() removed scrolling_list() select attribute fixed
virtual_port now works properly with the https protocol
upload_hook() and append() now works in function-oriented mode
POST_MAX doesn't cause the client to hang any more
Automatic tab indexes are now disabled and new -tabindex pragma hasbeen added to turn automatic indexes back on end_form() doesn't emit empty (and non-validating) <div>
CGI::Carp works better in certain mod_perl configurations
Setting $CGI::TMPDIRECTORY is now effective Enhanced documentation
charnames upgraded to version 1.05
CPAN upgraded to version 1.76_02
Cwd upgraded to version 3.12
canonpath() on Win32 now collapses foo\.. sections correctly.
Improved behaviour on Symbian OS. Enhanced documentation and typo fixes Internal cleanup
Data::Dumper upgraded to version 2.121_08
DB upgraded to version 1.01
DB_File upgraded to version 1.814
Devel::DProf upgraded to version 20050603.00
Devel::Peek upgraded to version 1.03
Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.06_01
--compat-version argument checking has been improved
Files passed on the command line are filtered by default --nofilter option to override the filtering has been added
Enhanced documentation
diagnostics upgraded to version 1.15
Digest upgraded to version 1.14
Digest::MD5 upgraded to version 2.36
Dumpvalue upgraded to version 1.12
DynaLoader upgraded but unfortunately we're not able to increment its version number :-(
Encode upgraded to version 2.12
A coderef is now acceptable for CHECK! 3 new characters added to the ISO-8859-7 encoding New encoding MIME-Header-ISO_2022_JP added Problem with partial characters and encoding(utf-8-strict) fixed. Documentation enhancements and typo fixes
English upgraded to version 1.02
ExtUtils::Constant upgraded to version 0.17
ExtUtils::MakeMaker upgraded to version 6.30 (was 6.17)
File::Basename upgraded to version 2.74, with changes contributed by Michael Schwern.
Documentation clarified and errors corrected. basename now strips trailing path separators before processing the name.
basename now returns / for parameter /, to make basenameconsistent with the shell utility of the same name.
The suffix is no longer stripped if it is identical to the remaining charactersin the name, again for consistency with the shell utility. Some internal code cleanup.
File::Copy upgraded to version 2.09
File::Find upgraded to version 1.10
Win32 portability fixes Enhanced documentation
File::Glob upgraded to version 1.05
File::Path upgraded to version 1.08
File::Spec upgraded to version 3.12
File::Spec-rootdir()> now returns \ on Win32, instead of /
$^O could sometimes become tainted. This has been fixed.
canonpath on Win32 now collapses foo/.. (or foo\..) sectionscorrectly, rather than doing the "misguided" work it was previously doing.Note that canonpath on Unix still does not collapse these sections, asdoing so would be incorrect.
Some documentation improvements Some internal code cleanup
FileCache upgraded to version 1.06
Filter::Simple upgraded to version 0.82
FindBin upgraded to version 1.47
GDBM_File upgraded to version 1.08
Getopt::Long upgraded to version 2.35
prefix_pattern has now been complemented by a new configurationoption long_prefix_pattern that allows the user to specify whatprefix patterns should have long option style semantics applied.
Options can now take multiple values at once (experimental) Various bug fixes
if upgraded to version 0.05
IO upgraded to version 1.22
Enhanced documentation Internal cleanup
IPC::Open2 upgraded to version 1.02
IPC::Open3 upgraded to version 1.02
List::Util upgraded to version 1.18 (was 1.14)
Fix pure-perl version of refaddr to avoid blessing an un-blessed reference Use XSLoader for faster loading Fixed various memory leaks Internal cleanup and portability fixes
Math::Complex upgraded to version 1.35
atan2(0, i) now works, as do all the (computable) complex argument cases
Fixes for certain bugs in make and emake Support returning the kth root directly Support [2,-3pi/8] in emake Support inf for make/emake Document make/emake more visibly
Math::Trig upgraded to version 1.03
MIME::Base64 upgraded to version 3.07
NDBM_File upgraded to version 1.06
ODBM_File upgraded to version 1.06
Documentation typo fixed Internal cleanup
Opcode upgraded to version 1.06
Enhanced documentation Internal cleanup
open upgraded to version 1.05
overload upgraded to version 1.04
PerlIO upgraded to version 1.04
PerlIO::via iterate over layers properly now
PerlIO::scalar understands $/ = "" now
encoding(utf-8-strict) with partial characters now works
Enhanced documentation Internal cleanup
Pod::Functions upgraded to version 1.03
Pod::Html upgraded to version 1.0504
HTML output will now correctly linkto =items on the same page, and should be valid XHTML. Variable names are recognized as intended Documentation typos fixed
Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.32
Allow files that start with =head on the first line Win32 portability fix Exit status of pod2usage fixed New -noperldoc switch for pod2usage Arbitrary URL schemes now allowed Documentation typos fixed
POSIX upgraded to version 1.09
re upgraded to version 0.05
Safe upgraded to version 2.12
SDBM_File upgraded to version 1.05
Documentation typo fixed Internal cleanup
Socket upgraded to version 1.78
Storable upgraded to version 2.15
Switch upgraded to version 2.10_01
Sys::Syslog upgraded to version 0.13
Now provides numeric macros and meaningful Exporter tags. No longer uses Sys::Hostname as it may provide useless values inunconfigured network environments, so instead uses INADDR_LOOPBACK directly. syslog() now uses local timestamp.
setlogmask() now behaves like its C counterpart.
setlogsock() will now croak() as documented.
Improved error and warnings messages. Improved documentation.
Term::ANSIColor upgraded to version 1.10
Term::ReadLine upgraded to version 1.02
Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.56 (was 2.48)
Test::Simple upgraded to version 0.62 (was 0.54)
Text::Tabs upgraded to version 2005.0824
Text::Wrap upgraded to version 2005.082401
threads upgraded to version 1.07
threads will now honour no warnings 'threads'
A thread's interpreter is now freed after $t->join() rather than afterundef $t, which should fix some ithreads memory leaks. (Fixed by DaveMitchell) Some documentation typo fixes.
threads::shared upgraded to version 0.94
Tie::Hash upgraded to version 1.02
Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.86 (was 1.66)
clock_nanosleep() and clock() functions added
Support for the POSIX clock_gettime() and clock_getres() has been added Return undef or an empty list if the C gettimeofday() function fails Improved nanosleep detection Internal cleanup Enhanced documentation
Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.52
Unicode::UCD upgraded to version 0.24
User::grent upgraded to version 1.01
utf8 upgraded to version 1.06
vmsish upgraded to version 1.02
warnings upgraded to version 1.05
Win32 upgraded to version 0.2601
XS::Typemap upgraded to version 0.02
Utility Changesh2xs enhancements
h2xs implements new option --use-xsloader to force use ofXSLoader 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 for *.phfiles by default any more. Use the -a option to run all tests.
New DocumentationThe perlglossary manpage is a glossary of terms used in the Perldocumentation, technical and otherwise, kindly provided by O'Reilly Media,inc. Performance EnhancementsWeak reference creation is now O(1) rather than O(n), courtesy ofNicholas Clark. Weak reference deletion remains O(n), but if deletion onlyhappens at program exit, it may be skipped completely. Salvador Fandiño provided improvements to reduce the memory usage of sortand to speed up some cases. Jarkko Hietaniemi and Andy Lester worked to mark as much data as possible inthe C source files as static, to increase the proportion of the executablefile that the operating system can share between process, and thus reducereal memory usage on multi-user systems.
Installation and Configuration ImprovementsParallel makes should work properly now, although there may still be problemsif make test is instructed to run in parallel. Building with Borland's compilers on Win32 should work more smoothly. Inparticular Steve Hay has worked to side step many warnings emitted by theircompilers and at least one C compiler internal error. Configure will now detect clearenv and unsetenv, thanks to a patchfrom Alan Burlison. It will also probe for futimes and whether sprintfcorrectly returns the length of the formatted string, which will both be usedin 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 Fixesno warnings 'category' works correctly with -wPreviously when running with warnings enabled globally via -w, selectivedisabling of specific warning categories would actually turn off all warnings.This is now fixed; now no warnings 'io'; will only turn off warnings in theio class. Previously it would erroneously turn off all warnings. This bug fix may cause some programs to start correctly issuing warnings. Remove over-optimisationPerl 5.8.4 introduced a change so that assignments of undef to ascalar, or of an empty list to an array or a hash, were optimised away. Asthis could cause problems when goto jumps were involved, this changehas been backed out. sprintf() fixesUsing the sprintf() function with some formats could lead to a bufferoverflow in some specific cases. This has been fixed, along with severalother bugs, notably in bounds checking. In related fixes, it was possible for badly written code that did not followthe documentation of Sys::Syslog to have formatting vulnerabilities.Sys::Syslog has been changed to protect people from poor quality thirdparty code. Debugger and Unicode slowdownIt had been reported that running under perl's debugger when processingUnicode data could cause unexpectedly large slowdowns. The most likely causeof this was identified and fixed by Nicholas Clark. Smaller fixesFindBin now works better with directories where access rights are morerestrictive than usual.
Several memory leaks in ithreads were closed. An improved implementation ofthreads::shared is available on CPAN - this will be merged into 5.8.9 ifit proves stable. Trailing spaces are now trimmed from $! and $^E. Operations that require perl to read a process's list of groups, such as readsof $( and $), now dynamically allocate memory rather than using afixed sized array. The fixed size array could cause C stack exhaustion onsystems configured to use large numbers of groups. PerlIO::scalar now works better with non-default $/ settings.
You can now use the x operator to repeat a qw// list. This usedto raise a syntax error. The debugger now traces correctly execution in eval("")uated code thatcontains #line directives. The value of the open pragma is no longer ignored for three-argumentopens. The optimisation of for (reverse @a) introduced in perl 5.8.6 couldmisbehave when the array had undefined elements and was used in LVALUEcontext. Dave Mitchell provided a fix. Some case insensitive matches between UTF-8 encoded data and 8 bit regexps,and vice versa, could give malformed character warnings. These have beenfixed by Dave Mitchell and Yves Orton. lcfirst and ucfirst could corrupt the string for certain cases wherethe length UTF-8 encoding of the string in lower case, upper case or titlecase differed. This was fixed by Nicholas Clark.
Perl will now use the C library calls unsetenv and clearenv if presentto delete keys from %ENV and delete %ENV entirely, thanks to a patchfrom Alan Burlison.
New or Changed DiagnosticsAttempt to set length of freed arrayThis is a new warning, produced in situations such as this: - $r = do {my @a; \$#a};
- $$r = 503;
Non-string passed as bitmaskThis is a new warning, produced when number has been passed as a argument toselect(), 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 patternThis syntax error indicates that the lexer couldn't find the finaldelimiter of a ?PATTERN? construct. Mentioning the ternary operator inthis error message makes it easier to diagnose syntax errors. Changed InternalsThere has been a fair amount of refactoring of the C source code, partly tomake it tidier and more maintainable. The resulting object code and theperl binary may well be smaller than 5.8.7, in particular due to a changecontributed by Dave Mitchell which reworked the warnings code to besignificantly smaller. Apart from being smaller and possibly faster, thereshould be no user-detectable changes. Andy Lester supplied many improvements to determine which functionparameters and local variables could actually be declared const to the Ccompiler. Steve Peters provided new *_set macros and reworked the core touse 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 roundedup to the next multiple of 4 (or 8 on platforms with 64 bit pointers). Thisshould reduce the number of calls to realloc without actually using anyextra 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 forked just beforeglobal destruction, which is used to display the values of any scalarsfound to have leaked at the end of global destruction. Without this, thescalars have already been freed sufficiently at the point of detection thatit is impossible to produce any meaningful dump of their contents. Thisfeature was implemented by the indefatigable Nicholas Clark, based on an ideaby Mike Giroux. Platform Specific ProblemsThe optimiser on HP-UX 11.23 (Itanium 2) is currently partly disabled (scaleddown to +O1) when using HP C-ANSI-C; the cause of problems at higheroptimisation levels is still unclear. There are a handful of remaining test failures on VMS, mostly due totest fixes and minor module tweaks with too many dependencies tointegrate into this release from the development stream, where they haveall been corrected. The following is a list of expected failures withthe patch number of the fix where that is known: - ext/Devel/PPPort/t/ppphtest.t #26913
- ext/List/Util/t/p_tainted.t #26912
- lib/ExtUtils/t/PL_FILES.t #26813
- lib/ExtUtils/t/basic.t #26813
- t/io/fs.t
- t/op/cmp.t
Reporting BugsIf you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articlesrecently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perlbug database at http://bugs.perl.org. There may also beinformation at http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page. If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbugprogram included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug downto a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with theoutput of perl -V, will be sent off to [email protected] to beanalysed by the Perl porting team. You can browse and searchthe Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/ SEE ALSOThe 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. | 
