Many minor bugs have been fixed. Scripts which happen to rely on previouslyerroneous behaviour will consider these fixes as incompatible changes :-)You are advised to perform sufficient acceptance testing on this releaseto satisfy yourself that this does not affect you, before putting thisrelease into production.

The diagnostic output of Carp has been changed slightly, to add a space afterthe comma between arguments. This makes it much easier for tools such asweb browsers to wrap it, but might confuse any automatic tools which performdetailed parsing of Carp output.

The internal dump output has been improved, so that non-printable characterssuch as newline and backspace are output in \x notation, rather thanoctal. This might just confuse non-robust tools which parse the output ofmodules such as Devel::Peek.

Core Enhancements

Malloc wrapping

Perl can now be built to detect attempts to assign pathologically large chunksof memory. Previously such assignments would suffer from integer wrap-aroundduring size calculations causing a misallocation, which would crash perl, andcould theoretically be used for "stack smashing" attacks. The wrappingdefaults to enabled on platforms where we know it works (most AIXconfigurations, BSDi, Darwin, DEC OSF/1, FreeBSD, HP/UX, GNU Linux, OpenBSD,Solaris, VMS and most Win32 compilers) and defaults to disabled on otherplatforms.

Unicode Character Database 4.0.1

The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 hasbeen updated to 4.0.1 from 4.0.0.

suidperl less insecure

Paul Szabo has analysed and patched suidperl to remove existing knowninsecurities. Currently there are no known holes in suidperl, but previousexperience shows that we cannot be confident that these were the last. You mayno longer invoke the set uid perl directly, so to preserve backwardscompatibility with scripts that invoke #!/usr/bin/suidperl the only set uidbinary is now sperl5.8.n (sperl5.8.4 for this release). suidperlis installed as a hard link to perl; both suidperl and perl willinvoke sperl5.8.4 automatically the set uid binary, so this change shouldbe completely transparent.

For new projects the core perl team would strongly recommend that you usededicated, single purpose security tools such as sudo in preference tosuidperl.

format

In addition to bug fixes, format's features have been enhanced. Seeperlform

Modules and Pragmata

The (mis)use of /tmp in core modules and documentation has been tidied up.Some modules available both within the perl core and independently from CPAN("dual-life modules") have not yet had these changes applied; the changeswill be integrated into future stable perl releases as the modules areupdated on CPAN.

Updated modules

Attribute::Handlers
B
Benchmark
CGI
Carp
Cwd
Exporter
File::Find
IO
IPC::Open3
Local::Maketext
Math::BigFloat
Math::BigInt
Math::BigRat
MIME::Base64
ODBM_File
POSIX
Shell
Socket
There is experimental support for Linux abstract Unix domain sockets.
Storable
Switch
Synced with its CPAN version 2.10
Sys::Syslog
syslog() can now use numeric constants for facility names and priorities,in addition to strings.
Term::ANSIColor
Time::HiRes
Unicode::UCD
Win32
Win32.pm/Win32.xs has moved from the libwin32 module to core Perl
base
open
threads
Detached threads are now also supported on Windows.
utf8

Performance Enhancements

Accelerated Unicode case mappings (/i, lc, uc, etc).
In place sort optimised (eg @a = sort @a)

Unnecessary assignment optimised away in

  my $s = undef;
   my @a = ();
   my %h = ();

Optimised map in scalar context

Utility Changes

The Perl debugger (lib/perl5db.pl) can now save all debugger commands forsourcing later, and can display the parent inheritance tree of a given class.

Installation and Configuration Improvements

The build process on both VMS and Windows has had several minor improvementsmade. On Windows Borland's C compiler can now compile perl with PerlIO and/orUSE_LARGE_FILES enabled.

perl.exe on Windows now has a "Camel" logo icon. The use of a camel withthe topic of Perl is a trademark of O'Reilly and Associates Inc., and is usedwith their permission (ie distribution of the source, compiling a Windowsexecutable from it, and using that executable locally). Use of the suppliedcamel for anything other than a perl executable's icon is specifically notcovered, and anyone wishing to redistribute perl binaries with the iconshould check directly with O'Reilly beforehand.

Perl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more.

Selected Bug Fixes

More utf8 bugs fixed, notably in how chomp, chop, send, andsyswrite and interact with utf8 data. Concatenation now works correctlywhen use bytes; is in scope.

Pragmata are now correctly propagated into (?{...}) constructions in regexps.Code such as

   my $x = qr{ ... (??{ $x }) ... };

will now (correctly) fail under use strict. (As the inner $x is andhas always referred to $::x)

The "const in void context" warning has been suppressed for a constant in anoptimised-away boolean expression such as 5 || print;

perl -i could fchmod(stdin) by mistake. This is serious if stdin isattached to a terminal, and perl is running as root. Now fixed.

New or Changed Diagnostics

Carp and the internal diagnostic routines used by Devel::Peek have beenmade clearer, as described in Incompatible Changes

Changed Internals

Some bugs have been fixed in the hash internals. Restricted hashes andtheir place holders are now allocated and deleted at slightly different times,but this should not be visible to user code.

Future Directions

Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.5) will be on 30th June2004, with release by mid July.

Platform Specific Problems

This release is known not to build on Windows 95.

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 v5.8.4

Daftar Isi

NAME

DESCRIPTION

Incompatible Changes