------------- Version 5.003 ------------- ***> IMPORTANT NOTICE: <*** The main reason for this release was to fix a security bug affecting suidperl on some systems. If you build suidperl on your system, it is strongly recommended that you replace any existing copies with version 5.003 or later immediately. The changes in 5.003 have been held to a minimum, in the hope that this will simplify installation and testing at sites which may be affected by the security hole in suidperl. In brief, 5.003 does the following: - Plugs security hole in suidperl mechanism on affected systems - MakeMaker was also updated to version 5.34, and extension Makefile.PLs were modified to match it. - The following hints files were updated: bsdos.sh, hpux.sh, linux.sh, machten.sh, solaris_2.sh - A fix was added to installperl to insure that file permissions were set correctly for the installed C header files. - t/op/stat.t was modified to work around MachTen's belief that /dev/null is a terminal device. - Incorporation of Perl version information into the VMS' version of config.h was changed to make it compatible with the older VAXC. - Minor fixes were made to VMS-specific C code, and the routine VMS::Filespec::rmsexpand was added. ---------------- Version 5.002_01 ---------------- - The EMBED namespace changes are now used by default, in order to better segregate Perl's C global symbols from those belonging to embedding applications or to libraries. This makes it necessary to rebuild dynamic extensions built under previous versions of Perl without the EMBED option. The default use of EMBED can be overridden by placing -DNO_EMBED on the cc command line. The EMBED change is the beginning of a general cleanup of C global symbols used by Perl, so binary compatibility with previously compiled dynamic extensions may be broken again in the next few releases. - Several bugs in the core were fixed, including the following: - made sure FILE * for -e temp file was closed only once - improved form of single-statement macro definitions to keep as many ccs as possible happy - fixed file tests to insure that signed values were used when computing differences between times. - fixed toke.c so implicit loop isn't doubled when perl is invoked with both the -p and -n switches - The new SUBVERSION number has been included in the default value for architecture-specific library directories, so development and production architecture-dependent libraries can coexist. - Two new magic variables, $^E and $^O, have been added. $^E contains the OS-specific equivalent of $!. $^O contains the name of the operating system, in order to make it easily available to Perl code whose behavior differs according to its environment. The standard library files have been converted to use $^O in preference to $Config{'osname'}. - A mechanism was added to allow listing of locally applied patches in the output of perl -v. - Miscellaneous minor corrections and updates were made to the documentation. - Extensive updates were made to the OS/2 and VMS ports - The following hints file were updated: bsdos.sh, dynixptx.sh, irix_6_2.sh, linux.sh, os2.sh - Several changes were made to standard library files: - reduced use of English.pm and $`, $', and $& in library modules, since these degrade module loading and evaluation of regular expressions, respectively. - File/Basename.pm: Added path separator to dirname('.') - File/Copy.pm: Added support for VMS and OS/2 system-level copy - MakeMaker updated to v5.26 - Symbol.pm now accepts old (') and new (::) package delimiters - Sys/Syslog.pm uses Sys::Hostname only when necessary - chat2.pl picks up necessary constants from socket.ph - syslog.pl: Corrected thinko 'Socket' --> 'Syslog' - xsubpp updated to v1.935 - The perlbug utility is now more cautious about sending mail, in order to reduce the chance of accidentally send a bug report by giving the wrong response to a prompt. - The -m switch has been added to perldoc, causing it to display the Perl code in target file as well as any documentation.