The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 hasbeen updated to 4.1.0 from 4.0.1. Seehttp://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.1.0/#NotableChanges for thenotable 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 usededicated, single purpose security tools such as sudo in preference tosuidperl.

Optional site customization script

The perl interpreter can be built to allow the use of a site customizationscript. By default this is not enabled, to be consistent with previous perlreleases. To use this, add -Dusesitecustomize to the command line flagswhen 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 usedcode and %Config values loaded on demand. This is transparent to theprogrammer, but means that most code will save parsing and loading 29K ofscript (for example, code that uses File::Find).

Modules and Pragmata

B upgraded to version 1.09
base upgraded to version 2.07
bignum upgraded to version 0.17
bytes upgraded to version 1.02
Carp upgraded to version 1.04
CGI upgraded to version 3.10
Class::ISA upgraded to version 0.33
Data::Dumper upgraded to version 2.121_02
DB_File upgraded to version 1.811
Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.06
Digest upgraded to version 1.10
Encode upgraded to version 2.10
FileCache upgraded to version 1.05
File::Path upgraded to version 1.07
File::Temp upgraded to version 0.16
IO::File upgraded to version 1.11
IO::Socket upgraded to version 1.28
Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.77
Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.15
overload upgraded to version 1.03
PathTools upgraded to version 3.05
Pod::HTML upgraded to version 1.0503
Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.14
Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.58
Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.30
Symbol upgraded to version 1.06
Term::ANSIColor upgraded to version 1.09
Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.48
Test::Simple upgraded to version 0.54
Text::Wrap upgraded to version 2001.09293, to fix a bug when wrap() wascalled with a non-space separator.
threads::shared upgraded to version 0.93
Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.66
Time::Local upgraded to version 1.11
Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.32
utf8 upgraded to version 1.05
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 anarena for memory allocation. In tests this reduced ithreads cloning time byabout 10%.

Installation and Configuration Improvements

The Win32 "dmake" makefile.mk has been updated to make it compatiblewith the latest versions of dmake.
PERL_MALLOC, DEBUG_MSTATS, PERL_HASH_SEED_EXPLICIT and NO_HASH_SEEDshould now work in Win32 makefiles.

Selected Bug Fixes

The socket() function on Win32 has been fixed so that it is able to usetransport providers which specify a protocol of 0 (meaning any protocolis allowed) once more. (This was broken in 5.8.6, and typically causedthe use of ICMP sockets to fail.)
Another obscure bug involving substr and UTF-8 caused by bad internaloffset caching has been identified and fixed.
A bug involving the loading of UTF-8 tables by the regexp engine has beenfixed - code such as "\x{100}" =~ /[[:print:]]/ will no longer givecorrupt results.
Case conversion operations such as uc on a long Unicode string couldexhaust memory. This has been fixed.
index/rindex were buggy for some combinations of Unicode andnon-Unicode data. This has been fixed.
read (and presumably sysread) would expose the UTF-8 internals whenreading from a byte oriented file handle into a UTF-8 scalar. This hasbeen fixed.
Several pack/unpack bug fixes:
- Checksums with b or B formats were broken.
- unpack checksums could overflow with the C format.
- U0 and C0 are now scoped to () pack sub-templates.
- Counted length prefixes now don't change C0/U0 mode.
- pack Z0 used to destroy the preceding character.
- P/p pack formats used to only recognise literal undef
Using closures with ithreads could cause perl to crash. This was due tofailure to correctly lock internal OP structures, and has been fixed.
The return value of close now correctly reflects any file errors thatoccur while flushing the handle's data, instead of just giving failure ifthe actual underlying file close operation failed.
not() || 1 used to segfault. not() now behaves like not(0), which wasthe pre 5.6.0 behaviour.
h2ph has various enhancements to cope with constructs in header files thatused 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 thrownwhen taint checks are enabled and when *ENV has been aliased, so that%ENV has no env-magic anymore and hence the environment cannot be verifiedas taint-free.

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

Changed Internals

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

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

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

Known Problems

Unicode strings returned from overloaded operators can be buggy. This is along standing bug reported since 5.8.6 was released, but we do not yet havea 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 lastCray is being decommissioned.

Reporting Bugs

If 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/

What is new for perl v5.8.7

Daftar Isi

NAME

DESCRIPTION

Incompatible Changes

Core Enhancements

Unicode Character Database 4.1.0