| 1 | =head1 NAME |
| 2 | |
| 3 | perl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4 |
| 4 | |
| 5 | =head1 DESCRIPTION |
| 6 | |
| 7 | This document describes differences between the 5.8.3 release and |
| 8 | the 5.8.4 release. |
| 9 | |
| 10 | =head1 Incompatible Changes |
| 11 | |
| 12 | Many minor bugs have been fixed. Scripts which happen to rely on previously |
| 13 | erroneous behaviour will consider these fixes as incompatible changes :-) |
| 14 | You are advised to perform sufficient acceptance testing on this release |
| 15 | to satisfy yourself that this does not affect you, before putting this |
| 16 | release into production. |
| 17 | |
| 18 | The diagnostic output of Carp has been changed slightly, to add a space after |
| 19 | the comma between arguments. This makes it much easier for tools such as |
| 20 | web browsers to wrap it, but might confuse any automatic tools which perform |
| 21 | detailed parsing of Carp output. |
| 22 | |
| 23 | The internal dump output has been improved, so that non-printable characters |
| 24 | such as newline and backspace are output in C<\x> notation, rather than |
| 25 | octal. This might just confuse non-robust tools which parse the output of |
| 26 | modules such as Devel::Peek. |
| 27 | |
| 28 | =head1 Core Enhancements |
| 29 | |
| 30 | =head2 Malloc wrapping |
| 31 | |
| 32 | Perl can now be built to detect attempts to assign pathologically large chunks |
| 33 | of memory. Previously such assignments would suffer from integer wrap-around |
| 34 | during size calculations causing a misallocation, which would crash perl, and |
| 35 | could theoretically be used for "stack smashing" attacks. The wrapping |
| 36 | defaults to enabled on platforms where we know it works (most AIX |
| 37 | configurations, BSDi, Darwin, DEC OSF/1, FreeBSD, HP/UX, GNU Linux, OpenBSD, |
| 38 | Solaris, VMS and most Win32 compilers) and defaults to disabled on other |
| 39 | platforms. |
| 40 | |
| 41 | =head2 Unicode Character Database 4.0.1 |
| 42 | |
| 43 | The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has |
| 44 | been updated to 4.0.1 from 4.0.0. |
| 45 | |
| 46 | =head2 suidperl less insecure |
| 47 | |
| 48 | Paul Szabo has analysed and patched C<suidperl> to remove existing known |
| 49 | insecurities. Currently there are no known holes in C<suidperl>, but previous |
| 50 | experience shows that we cannot be confident that these were the last. You may |
| 51 | no longer invoke the set uid perl directly, so to preserve backwards |
| 52 | compatibility with scripts that invoke #!/usr/bin/suidperl the only set uid |
| 53 | binary is now C<sperl5.8.>I<n> (C<sperl5.8.4> for this release). C<suidperl> |
| 54 | is installed as a hard link to C<perl>; both C<suidperl> and C<perl> will |
| 55 | invoke C<sperl5.8.4> automatically the set uid binary, so this change should |
| 56 | be completely transparent. |
| 57 | |
| 58 | For new projects the core perl team would strongly recommend that you use |
| 59 | dedicated, single purpose security tools such as C<sudo> in preference to |
| 60 | C<suidperl>. |
| 61 | |
| 62 | =head2 format |
| 63 | |
| 64 | In addition to bug fixes, C<format>'s features have been enhanced. See |
| 65 | L<perlform> |
| 66 | |
| 67 | =head1 Modules and Pragmata |
| 68 | |
| 69 | The (mis)use of C</tmp> in core modules and documentation has been tidied up. |
| 70 | Some modules available both within the perl core and independently from CPAN |
| 71 | ("dual-life modules") have not yet had these changes applied; the changes |
| 72 | will be integrated into future stable perl releases as the modules are |
| 73 | updated on CPAN. |
| 74 | |
| 75 | =head2 Updated modules |
| 76 | |
| 77 | =over 4 |
| 78 | |
| 79 | =item Attribute::Handlers |
| 80 | |
| 81 | =item B |
| 82 | |
| 83 | =item Benchmark |
| 84 | |
| 85 | =item CGI |
| 86 | |
| 87 | =item Carp |
| 88 | |
| 89 | =item Cwd |
| 90 | |
| 91 | =item Exporter |
| 92 | |
| 93 | =item File::Find |
| 94 | |
| 95 | =item IO |
| 96 | |
| 97 | =item IPC::Open3 |
| 98 | |
| 99 | =item Local::Maketext |
| 100 | |
| 101 | =item Math::BigFloat |
| 102 | |
| 103 | =item Math::BigInt |
| 104 | |
| 105 | =item Math::BigRat |
| 106 | |
| 107 | =item MIME::Base64 |
| 108 | |
| 109 | =item ODBM_File |
| 110 | |
| 111 | =item POSIX |
| 112 | |
| 113 | =item Shell |
| 114 | |
| 115 | =item Socket |
| 116 | |
| 117 | There is experimental support for Linux abstract Unix domain sockets. |
| 118 | |
| 119 | =item Storable |
| 120 | |
| 121 | =item Switch |
| 122 | |
| 123 | Synced with its CPAN version 2.10 |
| 124 | |
| 125 | =item Sys::Syslog |
| 126 | |
| 127 | C<syslog()> can now use numeric constants for facility names and priorities, |
| 128 | in addition to strings. |
| 129 | |
| 130 | =item Term::ANSIColor |
| 131 | |
| 132 | =item Time::HiRes |
| 133 | |
| 134 | =item Unicode::UCD |
| 135 | |
| 136 | =item Win32 |
| 137 | |
| 138 | Win32.pm/Win32.xs has moved from the libwin32 module to core Perl |
| 139 | |
| 140 | =item base |
| 141 | |
| 142 | =item open |
| 143 | |
| 144 | =item threads |
| 145 | |
| 146 | Detached threads are now also supported on Windows. |
| 147 | |
| 148 | =item utf8 |
| 149 | |
| 150 | =back |
| 151 | |
| 152 | =head1 Performance Enhancements |
| 153 | |
| 154 | =over 4 |
| 155 | |
| 156 | =item * |
| 157 | |
| 158 | Accelerated Unicode case mappings (C</i>, C<lc>, C<uc>, etc). |
| 159 | |
| 160 | =item * |
| 161 | |
| 162 | In place sort optimised (eg C<@a = sort @a>) |
| 163 | |
| 164 | =item * |
| 165 | |
| 166 | Unnecessary assignment optimised away in |
| 167 | |
| 168 | my $s = undef; |
| 169 | my @a = (); |
| 170 | my %h = (); |
| 171 | |
| 172 | =item * |
| 173 | |
| 174 | Optimised C<map> in scalar context |
| 175 | |
| 176 | =back |
| 177 | |
| 178 | =head1 Utility Changes |
| 179 | |
| 180 | The Perl debugger (F<lib/perl5db.pl>) can now save all debugger commands for |
| 181 | sourcing later, and can display the parent inheritance tree of a given class. |
| 182 | |
| 183 | =head1 Installation and Configuration Improvements |
| 184 | |
| 185 | The build process on both VMS and Windows has had several minor improvements |
| 186 | made. On Windows Borland's C compiler can now compile perl with PerlIO and/or |
| 187 | USE_LARGE_FILES enabled. |
| 188 | |
| 189 | C<perl.exe> on Windows now has a "Camel" logo icon. The use of a camel with |
| 190 | the topic of Perl is a trademark of O'Reilly and Associates Inc., and is used |
| 191 | with their permission (ie distribution of the source, compiling a Windows |
| 192 | executable from it, and using that executable locally). Use of the supplied |
| 193 | camel for anything other than a perl executable's icon is specifically not |
| 194 | covered, and anyone wishing to redistribute perl binaries I<with> the icon |
| 195 | should check directly with O'Reilly beforehand. |
| 196 | |
| 197 | Perl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more. |
| 198 | |
| 199 | =head1 Selected Bug Fixes |
| 200 | |
| 201 | More utf8 bugs fixed, notably in how C<chomp>, C<chop>, C<send>, and |
| 202 | C<syswrite> and interact with utf8 data. Concatenation now works correctly |
| 203 | when C<use bytes;> is in scope. |
| 204 | |
| 205 | Pragmata are now correctly propagated into (?{...}) constructions in regexps. |
| 206 | Code such as |
| 207 | |
| 208 | my $x = qr{ ... (??{ $x }) ... }; |
| 209 | |
| 210 | will now (correctly) fail under use strict. (As the inner C<$x> is and |
| 211 | has always referred to C<$::x>) |
| 212 | |
| 213 | The "const in void context" warning has been suppressed for a constant in an |
| 214 | optimised-away boolean expression such as C<5 || print;> |
| 215 | |
| 216 | C<perl -i> could C<fchmod(stdin)> by mistake. This is serious if stdin is |
| 217 | attached to a terminal, and perl is running as root. Now fixed. |
| 218 | |
| 219 | =head1 New or Changed Diagnostics |
| 220 | |
| 221 | C<Carp> and the internal diagnostic routines used by C<Devel::Peek> have been |
| 222 | made clearer, as described in L</Incompatible Changes> |
| 223 | |
| 224 | =head1 Changed Internals |
| 225 | |
| 226 | Some bugs have been fixed in the hash internals. Restricted hashes and |
| 227 | their place holders are now allocated and deleted at slightly different times, |
| 228 | but this should not be visible to user code. |
| 229 | |
| 230 | =head1 Future Directions |
| 231 | |
| 232 | Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.5) will be on 30th June |
| 233 | 2004, with release by mid July. |
| 234 | |
| 235 | =head1 Platform Specific Problems |
| 236 | |
| 237 | This release is known not to build on Windows 95. |
| 238 | |
| 239 | =head1 Reporting Bugs |
| 240 | |
| 241 | If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles |
| 242 | recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl |
| 243 | bug database at http://bugs.perl.org. There may also be |
| 244 | information at http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page. |
| 245 | |
| 246 | If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the B<perlbug> |
| 247 | program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down |
| 248 | to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the |
| 249 | output of C<perl -V>, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be |
| 250 | analysed by the Perl porting team. You can browse and search |
| 251 | the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/ |
| 252 | |
| 253 | =head1 SEE ALSO |
| 254 | |
| 255 | The F<Changes> file for exhaustive details on what changed. |
| 256 | |
| 257 | The F<INSTALL> file for how to build Perl. |
| 258 | |
| 259 | The F<README> file for general stuff. |
| 260 | |
| 261 | The F<Artistic> and F<Copying> files for copyright information. |
| 262 | |
| 263 | =cut |