| 1 | =head1 NAME |
| 2 | |
| 3 | perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5 |
| 4 | |
| 5 | =head1 DESCRIPTION |
| 6 | |
| 7 | This document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release and |
| 8 | the 5.8.5 release. |
| 9 | |
| 10 | =head1 Incompatible Changes |
| 11 | |
| 12 | There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4. |
| 13 | |
| 14 | =head1 Core Enhancements |
| 15 | |
| 16 | Perl's regular expression engine now contains support for matching on the |
| 17 | intersection of two Unicode character classes. You can also now refer to |
| 18 | user-defined character classes from within other user defined character |
| 19 | classes. |
| 20 | |
| 21 | =head1 Modules and Pragmata |
| 22 | |
| 23 | =over 4 |
| 24 | |
| 25 | =item * |
| 26 | |
| 27 | Carp improved to work nicely with Safe. Carp's message reporting should now |
| 28 | be anomaly free - it will always print out line number information. |
| 29 | |
| 30 | =item * |
| 31 | |
| 32 | CGI upgraded to version 3.05 |
| 33 | |
| 34 | =item * |
| 35 | |
| 36 | charnames now avoids clobbering $_ |
| 37 | |
| 38 | =item * |
| 39 | |
| 40 | Digest upgraded to version 1.08 |
| 41 | |
| 42 | =item * |
| 43 | |
| 44 | Encode upgraded to version 2.01 |
| 45 | |
| 46 | =item * |
| 47 | |
| 48 | FileCache upgraded to version 1.04 |
| 49 | |
| 50 | =item * |
| 51 | |
| 52 | libnet upgraded to version 1.19 |
| 53 | |
| 54 | =item * |
| 55 | |
| 56 | Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28 |
| 57 | |
| 58 | =item * |
| 59 | |
| 60 | Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13 |
| 61 | |
| 62 | =item * |
| 63 | |
| 64 | Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57 |
| 65 | |
| 66 | =item * |
| 67 | |
| 68 | Safe now works properly with Carp |
| 69 | |
| 70 | =item * |
| 71 | |
| 72 | Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14 |
| 73 | |
| 74 | =item * |
| 75 | |
| 76 | Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its historical partial |
| 77 | auto-quoting of command arguments can now be disabled. |
| 78 | |
| 79 | =item * |
| 80 | |
| 81 | Test upgraded to version 1.25 |
| 82 | |
| 83 | =item * |
| 84 | |
| 85 | Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42 |
| 86 | |
| 87 | =item * |
| 88 | |
| 89 | Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10 |
| 90 | |
| 91 | =item * |
| 92 | |
| 93 | Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40 |
| 94 | |
| 95 | =item * |
| 96 | |
| 97 | Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30 |
| 98 | |
| 99 | =back |
| 100 | |
| 101 | =head1 Utility Changes |
| 102 | |
| 103 | =head2 Perl's debugger |
| 104 | |
| 105 | The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and rerunning |
| 106 | all bar the last command from a saved command history. |
| 107 | |
| 108 | =head2 h2ph |
| 109 | |
| 110 | F<h2ph> is now able to understand a very limited set of C inline functions |
| 111 | -- basically, the inline functions that look like CPP macros. This has |
| 112 | been introduced to deal with some of the headers of the newest versions of |
| 113 | the glibc. The standard warning still applies; to quote F<h2ph>'s |
| 114 | documentation, I<you may need to dicker with the files produced>. |
| 115 | |
| 116 | =head1 Installation and Configuration Improvements |
| 117 | |
| 118 | Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS. |
| 119 | |
| 120 | =head1 Selected Bug Fixes |
| 121 | |
| 122 | =over 4 |
| 123 | |
| 124 | =item * |
| 125 | |
| 126 | The in-place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a bug. For example, |
| 127 | in code such as |
| 128 | |
| 129 | @a = sort ($b, @a) |
| 130 | |
| 131 | the result would omit the value $b. This is now fixed. |
| 132 | |
| 133 | =item * |
| 134 | |
| 135 | The optimisation for unnecessary assignments introduced in 5.8.4 could give |
| 136 | spurious warnings. This has been fixed. |
| 137 | |
| 138 | =item * |
| 139 | |
| 140 | Perl should now correctly detect and read BOM-marked and (BOMless) UTF-16 |
| 141 | scripts of either endianness. |
| 142 | |
| 143 | =item * |
| 144 | |
| 145 | Creating a new thread when weak references exist was buggy, and would often |
| 146 | cause warnings at interpreter destruction time. The known bug is now fixed. |
| 147 | |
| 148 | =item * |
| 149 | |
| 150 | Several obscure bugs involving manipulating Unicode strings with C<substr> have |
| 151 | been fixed. |
| 152 | |
| 153 | =item * |
| 154 | |
| 155 | Previously if Perl's file globbing function encountered a directory that it |
| 156 | did not have permission to open it would return immediately, leading to |
| 157 | unexpected truncation of the list of results. This has been fixed, to be |
| 158 | consistent with Unix shells' globbing behaviour. |
| 159 | |
| 160 | =item * |
| 161 | |
| 162 | Thread creation time could vary wildly between identical runs. This was caused |
| 163 | by a poor hashing algorithm in the thread cloning routines, which has now |
| 164 | been fixed. |
| 165 | |
| 166 | =item * |
| 167 | |
| 168 | The internals of the ithreads implementation were not checking if OS-level |
| 169 | thread creation had failed. threads->create() now returns C<undef> in if |
| 170 | thread creation fails instead of crashing perl. |
| 171 | |
| 172 | =back |
| 173 | |
| 174 | =head1 New or Changed Diagnostics |
| 175 | |
| 176 | =over 4 |
| 177 | |
| 178 | =item * |
| 179 | |
| 180 | Perl -V has several improvements |
| 181 | |
| 182 | =over 4 |
| 183 | |
| 184 | =item * |
| 185 | |
| 186 | correctly outputs local patch names that contain embedded code snippets |
| 187 | or other characters that used to confuse it. |
| 188 | |
| 189 | =item * |
| 190 | |
| 191 | arguments to -V that look like regexps will give multiple lines of output. |
| 192 | |
| 193 | =item * |
| 194 | |
| 195 | a trailing colon suppresses the linefeed and ';' terminator, allowing |
| 196 | embedding of queries into shell commands. |
| 197 | |
| 198 | =item * |
| 199 | |
| 200 | a leading colon removes the 'name=' part of the response, allowing mapping to |
| 201 | any name. |
| 202 | |
| 203 | =back |
| 204 | |
| 205 | =item * |
| 206 | |
| 207 | When perl fails to find the specified script, it now outputs a second line |
| 208 | suggesting that the user use the C<-S> flag: |
| 209 | |
| 210 | $ perl5.8.5 missing.pl |
| 211 | Can't open perl script "missing.pl": No such file or directory. |
| 212 | Use -S to search $PATH for it. |
| 213 | |
| 214 | =back |
| 215 | |
| 216 | =head1 Changed Internals |
| 217 | |
| 218 | The Unicode character class files used by the regular expression engine are |
| 219 | now built at build time from the supplied Unicode consortium data files, |
| 220 | instead of being shipped prebuilt. This makes the compressed Perl source |
| 221 | tarball about 200K smaller. A side effect is that the layout of files inside |
| 222 | lib/unicore has changed. |
| 223 | |
| 224 | =head1 Known Problems |
| 225 | |
| 226 | The regression test F<t/uni/class.t> is now performing considerably more |
| 227 | tests, and can take several minutes to run even on a fast machine. |
| 228 | |
| 229 | =head1 Platform Specific Problems |
| 230 | |
| 231 | This release is known not to build on Windows 95. |
| 232 | |
| 233 | =head1 Reporting Bugs |
| 234 | |
| 235 | If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles |
| 236 | recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl |
| 237 | bug database at http://bugs.perl.org. There may also be |
| 238 | information at http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page. |
| 239 | |
| 240 | If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the B<perlbug> |
| 241 | program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down |
| 242 | to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the |
| 243 | output of C<perl -V>, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be |
| 244 | analysed by the Perl porting team. You can browse and search |
| 245 | the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/ |
| 246 | |
| 247 | =head1 SEE ALSO |
| 248 | |
| 249 | The F<Changes> file for exhaustive details on what changed. |
| 250 | |
| 251 | The F<INSTALL> file for how to build Perl. |
| 252 | |
| 253 | The F<README> file for general stuff. |
| 254 | |
| 255 | The F<Artistic> and F<Copying> files for copyright information. |
| 256 | |
| 257 | =cut |