perldelta - what is new for perl v5.8.8
This document describes differences between the 5.8.7 release and the 5.8.8 release.
There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.8.7. If any exist, they are bugs and reports are welcome.
chdir, chmod and chown can now work on filehandles as well as
filenames, if the system supports respectively fchdir
, fchmod
and
fchown
, thanks to a patch provided by Gisle Aas.
Attribute::Handlers
upgraded to version 0.78_02
Documentation typo fix
attrs
upgraded to version 1.02
Internal cleanup only
autouse
upgraded to version 1.05
Simplified implementation
B
upgraded to version 1.09_01
The inheritance hierarchy of the B::
modules has been corrected;
B::NV
now inherits from B::SV
(instead of B::IV
).
blib
upgraded to version 1.03
Documentation typo fix
ByteLoader
upgraded to version 0.06
Internal cleanup
CGI
upgraded to version 3.15
Extraneous "?" from self_url()
removed
scrolling_list()
select attribute fixed
virtual_port
now works properly with the https protocol
upload_hook()
and append()
now works in function-oriented mode
POST_MAX
doesn't cause the client to hang any more
Automatic tab indexes are now disabled and new -tabindex
pragma has
been added to turn automatic indexes back on
end_form()
doesn't emit empty (and non-validating) <div>
CGI::Carp
works better in certain mod_perl configurations
Setting $CGI::TMPDIRECTORY
is now effective
Enhanced documentation
charnames
upgraded to version 1.05
viacode()
now accept hex strings and has been optimized.
CPAN
upgraded to version 1.76_02
1 minor bug fix for Win32
Cwd
upgraded to version 3.12
canonpath()
on Win32 now collapses foo\.. sections correctly.
Improved behaviour on Symbian OS.
Enhanced documentation and typo fixes
Internal cleanup
Data::Dumper
upgraded to version 2.121_08
A problem where Data::Dumper
would sometimes update the iterator state
of hashes has been fixed
Numeric labels now work
Internal cleanup
DB
upgraded to version 1.01
A problem where the state of the regexp engine would sometimes get clobbered when running under the debugger has been fixed.
DB_File
upgraded to version 1.814
Adds support for Berkeley DB 4.4.
Devel::DProf
upgraded to version 20050603.00
Internal cleanup
Devel::Peek
upgraded to version 1.03
Internal cleanup
Devel::PPPort
upgraded to version 3.06_01
--compat-version
argument checking has been improved
Files passed on the command line are filtered by default
--nofilter
option to override the filtering has been added
Enhanced documentation
diagnostics
upgraded to version 1.15
Documentation typo fix
Digest
upgraded to version 1.14
The constructor now knows which module implements SHA-224
Documentation tweaks and typo fixes
Digest::MD5
upgraded to version 2.36
XSLoader
is now used for faster loading
Enhanced documentation including MD5 weaknesses discovered lately
Dumpvalue
upgraded to version 1.12
Documentation fix
DynaLoader
upgraded but unfortunately we're not able to increment its version number :-(
Implements dl_unload_file
on Win32
Internal cleanup
XSLoader
0.06 incorporated; small optimisation for calling
bootstrap_inherit()
and documentation enhancements.
Encode
upgraded to version 2.12
A coderef is now acceptable for CHECK
!
3 new characters added to the ISO-8859-7 encoding
New encoding MIME-Header-ISO_2022_JP
added
Problem with partial characters and encoding(utf-8-strict)
fixed.
Documentation enhancements and typo fixes
English
upgraded to version 1.02
the $COMPILING
variable has been added
ExtUtils::Constant
upgraded to version 0.17
Improved compatibility with older versions of perl
ExtUtils::MakeMaker
upgraded to version 6.30 (was 6.17)
Too much to list here; see http://search.cpan.org/src/MSCHWERN/ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.30/Changes
File::Basename
upgraded to version 2.74, with changes contributed by Michael Schwern.
Documentation clarified and errors corrected.
basename
now strips trailing path separators before processing the name.
basename
now returns / for parameter /, to make basename
consistent with the shell utility of the same name.
The suffix is no longer stripped if it is identical to the remaining characters in the name, again for consistency with the shell utility.
Some internal code cleanup.
File::Copy
upgraded to version 2.09
Copying a file onto itself used to fail.
Moving a file between file systems now preserves the access and modification time stamps
File::Find
upgraded to version 1.10
Win32 portability fixes
Enhanced documentation
File::Glob
upgraded to version 1.05
Internal cleanup
File::Path
upgraded to version 1.08
mkpath
now preserves errno
when mkdir fails
File::Spec
upgraded to version 3.12
File::Spec-
rootdir()> now returns \
on Win32, instead of /
$^O
could sometimes become tainted. This has been fixed.
canonpath
on Win32 now collapses foo/..
(or foo\..
) sections
correctly, rather than doing the "misguided" work it was previously doing.
Note that canonpath
on Unix still does not collapse these sections, as
doing so would be incorrect.
Some documentation improvements
Some internal code cleanup
FileCache
upgraded to version 1.06
POD formatting errors in the documentation fixed
Filter::Simple
upgraded to version 0.82
FindBin
upgraded to version 1.47
Now works better with directories where access rights are more restrictive than usual.
GDBM_File
upgraded to version 1.08
Internal cleanup
Getopt::Long
upgraded to version 2.35
prefix_pattern
has now been complemented by a new configuration
option long_prefix_pattern
that allows the user to specify what
prefix patterns should have long option style semantics applied.
Options can now take multiple values at once (experimental)
Various bug fixes
if
upgraded to version 0.05
Give more meaningful error messages from if
when invoked with a
condition in list context.
Restore backwards compatibility with earlier versions of perl
IO
upgraded to version 1.22
Enhanced documentation
Internal cleanup
IPC::Open2
upgraded to version 1.02
Enhanced documentation
IPC::Open3
upgraded to version 1.02
Enhanced documentation
List::Util
upgraded to version 1.18 (was 1.14)
Fix pure-perl version of refaddr
to avoid blessing an un-blessed reference
Use XSLoader
for faster loading
Fixed various memory leaks
Internal cleanup and portability fixes
Math::Complex
upgraded to version 1.35
atan2(0, i)
now works, as do all the (computable) complex argument cases
Fixes for certain bugs in make
and emake
Support returning the kth root directly
Support [2,-3pi/8] in emake
Support inf
for make
/emake
Document make
/emake
more visibly
Math::Trig
upgraded to version 1.03
Add more great circle routines: great_circle_waypoint
and
great_circle_destination
MIME::Base64
upgraded to version 3.07
Use XSLoader
for faster loading
Enhanced documentation
Internal cleanup
NDBM_File
upgraded to version 1.06
Enhanced documentation
ODBM_File
upgraded to version 1.06
Documentation typo fixed
Internal cleanup
Opcode
upgraded to version 1.06
Enhanced documentation
Internal cleanup
open upgraded to version 1.05
Enhanced documentation
overload
upgraded to version 1.04
Enhanced documentation
PerlIO
upgraded to version 1.04
PerlIO::via
iterate over layers properly now
PerlIO::scalar
understands $/ = ""
now
encoding(utf-8-strict)
with partial characters now works
Enhanced documentation
Internal cleanup
Pod::Functions
upgraded to version 1.03
Documentation typos fixed
Pod::Html
upgraded to version 1.0504
HTML output will now correctly link
to =item
s on the same page, and should be valid XHTML.
Variable names are recognized as intended
Documentation typos fixed
Pod::Parser
upgraded to version 1.32
Allow files that start with =head
on the first line
Win32 portability fix
Exit status of pod2usage
fixed
New -noperldoc
switch for pod2usage
Arbitrary URL schemes now allowed
Documentation typos fixed
POSIX
upgraded to version 1.09
Documentation typos fixed
Internal cleanup
re
upgraded to version 0.05
Documentation typo fixed
Safe
upgraded to version 2.12
Minor documentation enhancement
SDBM_File
upgraded to version 1.05
Documentation typo fixed
Internal cleanup
Socket
upgraded to version 1.78
Internal cleanup
Storable
upgraded to version 2.15
This includes the STORABLE_attach
hook functionality added by
Adam Kennedy, and more frugal memory requirements when storing under ithreads
, by
using the ithreads
cloning tracking code.
Switch
upgraded to version 2.10_01
Documentation typos fixed
Sys::Syslog
upgraded to version 0.13
Now provides numeric macros and meaningful Exporter
tags.
No longer uses Sys::Hostname
as it may provide useless values in
unconfigured network environments, so instead uses INADDR_LOOPBACK
directly.
syslog()
now uses local timestamp.
setlogmask()
now behaves like its C counterpart.
setlogsock()
will now croak()
as documented.
Improved error and warnings messages.
Improved documentation.
Term::ANSIColor
upgraded to version 1.10
Fixes a bug in colored
when $EACHLINE
is set that caused it to not color
lines consisting solely of 0 (literal zero).
Improved tests.
Term::ReadLine
upgraded to version 1.02
Documentation tweaks
Test::Harness
upgraded to version 2.56 (was 2.48)
The Test::Harness
timer is now off by default.
Now shows elapsed time in milliseconds.
Various bug fixes
Test::Simple
upgraded to version 0.62 (was 0.54)
is_deeply()
no longer fails to work for many cases
Various minor bug fixes
Documentation enhancements
Text::Tabs
upgraded to version 2005.0824
Provides a faster implementation of expand
Text::Wrap
upgraded to version 2005.082401
Adds $Text::Wrap::separator2
, which allows you to preserve existing newlines
but add line-breaks with some other string.
threads
upgraded to version 1.07
threads::shared
upgraded to version 0.94
Documentation changes only
Note: An improved implementation of threads::shared
is available on
CPAN - this will be merged into 5.8.9 if it proves stable.
Tie::Hash
upgraded to version 1.02
Documentation typo fixed
Time::HiRes
upgraded to version 1.86 (was 1.66)
clock_nanosleep()
and clock()
functions added
Support for the POSIX clock_gettime()
and clock_getres()
has been added
Return undef or an empty list if the C gettimeofday()
function fails
Improved nanosleep
detection
Internal cleanup
Enhanced documentation
Unicode::Collate
upgraded to version 0.52
Now implements UCA Revision 14 (based on Unicode 4.1.0).
Unicode::Collate-
new> method no longer overwrites user's $_
Enhanced documentation
Unicode::UCD
upgraded to version 0.24
Documentation typos fixed
User::grent
upgraded to version 1.01
Documentation typo fixed
utf8
upgraded to version 1.06
Documentation typos fixed
vmsish
upgraded to version 1.02
Documentation typos fixed
warnings
upgraded to version 1.05
Gentler messing with Carp::
internals
Internal cleanup
Documentation update
Win32
upgraded to version 0.2601
Provides Windows Vista support to Win32::GetOSName
Documentation enhancements
XS::Typemap
upgraded to version 0.02
Internal cleanup
h2xs
enhancementsh2xs
implements new option --use-xsloader
to force use of
XSLoader
even in backwards compatible modules.
The handling of authors' names that had apostrophes has been fixed.
Any enums with negative values are now skipped.
perlivp
enhancementsperlivp
implements new option -a
and will not check for *.ph
files by default any more. Use the -a
option to run all tests.
The perlglossary manpage is a glossary of terms used in the Perl documentation, technical and otherwise, kindly provided by O'Reilly Media, inc.
Weak reference creation is now O(1) rather than O(n), courtesy of Nicholas Clark. Weak reference deletion remains O(n), but if deletion only happens at program exit, it may be skipped completely.
Salvador Fandiño provided improvements to reduce the memory usage of sort
and to speed up some cases.
Jarkko Hietaniemi and Andy Lester worked to mark as much data as possible in
the C source files as static
, to increase the proportion of the executable
file that the operating system can share between process, and thus reduce
real memory usage on multi-user systems.
Parallel makes should work properly now, although there may still be problems
if make test
is instructed to run in parallel.
Building with Borland's compilers on Win32 should work more smoothly. In particular Steve Hay has worked to side step many warnings emitted by their compilers and at least one C compiler internal error.
Configure
will now detect clearenv
and unsetenv
, thanks to a patch
from Alan Burlison. It will also probe for futimes
and whether sprintf
correctly returns the length of the formatted string, which will both be used
in perl 5.8.9.
There are improved hints for next-3.0, vmesa, IX, Darwin, Solaris, Linux, DEC/OSF, HP-UX and MPE/iX
Perl extensions on Windows now can be statically built into the Perl DLL, thanks to a work by Vadim Konovalov. (This improvement was actually in 5.8.7, but was accidentally omitted from perl587delta).
Previously when running with warnings enabled globally via -w
, selective
disabling of specific warning categories would actually turn off all warnings.
This is now fixed; now no warnings 'io';
will only turn off warnings in the
io
class. Previously it would erroneously turn off all warnings.
This bug fix may cause some programs to start correctly issuing warnings.
Perl 5.8.4 introduced a change so that assignments of undef to a
scalar, or of an empty list to an array or a hash, were optimised away. As
this could cause problems when goto jumps were involved, this change
has been backed out.
Using the sprintf() function with some formats could lead to a buffer overflow in some specific cases. This has been fixed, along with several other bugs, notably in bounds checking.
In related fixes, it was possible for badly written code that did not follow
the documentation of Sys::Syslog
to have formatting vulnerabilities.
Sys::Syslog
has been changed to protect people from poor quality third
party code.
It had been reported that running under perl's debugger when processing Unicode data could cause unexpectedly large slowdowns. The most likely cause of this was identified and fixed by Nicholas Clark.
FindBin
now works better with directories where access rights are more
restrictive than usual.
Several memory leaks in ithreads were closed. An improved implementation of
threads::shared
is available on CPAN - this will be merged into 5.8.9 if
it proves stable.
Trailing spaces are now trimmed from $!
and $^E
.
Operations that require perl to read a process' list of groups, such as reads
of $(
and $)
, now dynamically allocate memory rather than using a
fixed sized array. The fixed size array could cause C stack exhaustion on
systems configured to use large numbers of groups.
PerlIO::scalar
now works better with non-default $/
settings.
You can now use the x
operator to repeat a qw// list. This used
to raise a syntax error.
The debugger now traces correctly execution in eval("")uated code that contains #line directives.
The value of the open pragma is no longer ignored for three-argument
opens.
The optimisation of for (reverse @a)
introduced in perl 5.8.6 could
misbehave when the array had undefined elements and was used in LVALUE
context. Dave Mitchell provided a fix.
Some case insensitive matches between UTF-8 encoded data and 8 bit regexps, and vice versa, could give malformed character warnings. These have been fixed by Dave Mitchell and Yves Orton.
lcfirst and ucfirst could corrupt the string for certain cases where
the length UTF-8 encoding of the string in lower case, upper case or title
case differed. This was fixed by Nicholas Clark.
Perl will now use the C library calls unsetenv
and clearenv
if present
to delete keys from %ENV
and delete %ENV
entirely, thanks to a patch
from Alan Burlison.
This is a new warning, produced in situations such as this:
This is a new warning, produced when number has been passed as a argument to select(), instead of a bitmask.
This syntax error indicates that the lexer couldn't find the final
delimiter of a ?PATTERN?
construct. Mentioning the ternary operator in
this error message makes it easier to diagnose syntax errors.
There has been a fair amount of refactoring of the C
source code, partly to
make it tidier and more maintainable. The resulting object code and the
perl
binary may well be smaller than 5.8.7, in particular due to a change
contributed by Dave Mitchell which reworked the warnings code to be
significantly smaller. Apart from being smaller and possibly faster, there
should be no user-detectable changes.
Andy Lester supplied many improvements to determine which function
parameters and local variables could actually be declared const
to the C
compiler. Steve Peters provided new *_set
macros and reworked the core to
use these rather than assigning to macros in LVALUE context.
Dave Mitchell improved the lexer debugging output under -DT
Nicholas Clark changed the string buffer allocation so that it is now rounded
up to the next multiple of 4 (or 8 on platforms with 64 bit pointers). This
should reduce the number of calls to realloc
without actually using any
extra memory.
The HV
's array of HE*
s is now allocated at the correct (minimal) size,
thanks to another change by Nicholas Clark. Compile with
-DPERL_USE_LARGE_HV_ALLOC
to use the old, sloppier, default.
For XS or embedding debugging purposes, if perl is compiled with
-DDEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS_FORK_DUMP
in addition to
-DDEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS
then a child process is forked just before
global destruction, which is used to display the values of any scalars
found to have leaked at the end of global destruction. Without this, the
scalars have already been freed sufficiently at the point of detection that
it is impossible to produce any meaningful dump of their contents. This
feature was implemented by the indefatigable Nicholas Clark, based on an idea
by Mike Giroux.
The optimiser on HP-UX 11.23 (Itanium 2) is currently partly disabled (scaled down to +O1) when using HP C-ANSI-C; the cause of problems at higher optimisation levels is still unclear.
There are a handful of remaining test failures on VMS, mostly due to test fixes and minor module tweaks with too many dependencies to integrate into this release from the development stream, where they have all been corrected. The following is a list of expected failures with the patch number of the fix where that is known:
- ext/Devel/PPPort/t/ppphtest.t #26913
- ext/List/Util/t/p_tainted.t #26912
- lib/ExtUtils/t/PL_FILES.t #26813
- lib/ExtUtils/t/basic.t #26813
- t/io/fs.t
- t/op/cmp.t
If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at http://bugs.perl.org. There may also be information at http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page.
If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down
to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the
output of perl -V
, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be
analysed by the Perl porting team. You can browse and search
the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/
The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.
The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
The README file for general stuff.
The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.