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PERL584DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL584DELTA(1)

NAME

perl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.8.3 release and the 5.8.4 release. IInnccoommppaattiibbllee CChhaannggeess

Many minor bugs have been fixed. Scripts which happen to rely on previ-

ously erroneous behaviour will consider these fixes as incompatible

changes :-) You are advised to perform sufficient acceptance testing on

this release to satisfy yourself that this does not affect you, before putting this release into production. The diagnostic output of Carp has been changed slightly, to add a space after the comma between arguments. This makes it much easier for tools such as web browsers to wrap it, but might confuse any automatic tools which perform detailed parsing of Carp output.

The internal dump output has been improved, so that non-printable char-

acters such as newline and backspace are output in "\x" notation,

rather than octal. This might just confuse non-robust tools which parse

the output of modules such as Devel::Peek. CCoorree EEnnhhaanncceemmeennttss MMaalllloocc wwrraappppiinngg Perl can now be built to detect attempts to assign pathologically large

chunks of memory. Previously such assignments would suffer from inte-

ger wrap-around during size calculations causing a misallocation, which

would crash perl, and could theoretically be used for "stack smashing" attacks. The wrapping defaults to enabled on platforms where we know it works (most AIX configurations, BSDi, Darwin, DEC OSF/1, FreeBSD, HP/UX, GNU Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, VMS and most Win32 compilers) and defaults to disabled on other platforms. UUnniiccooddee CChhaarraacctteerr DDaattaabbaassee 44..00..11 The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has been updated to 4.0.1 from 4.0.0. ssuuiiddppeerrll lleessss iinnsseeccuurree Paul Szabo has analysed and patched "suidperl" to remove existing known insecurities. Currently there are no known holes in "suidperl", but previous experience shows that we cannot be confident that these were the last. You may no longer invoke the set uid perl directly, so to preserve backwards compatibility with scripts that invoke

#!/usr/bin/suidperl the only set uid binary is now "sperl5.8."n

("sperl5.8.4" for this release). "suidperl" is installed as a hard link

to "perl"; both "suidperl" and "perl" will invoke "sperl5.8.4" automat-

ically the set uid binary, so this change should be completely trans-

parent. For new projects the core perl team would strongly recommend that you

use dedicated, single purpose security tools such as "sudo" in prefer-

ence to "suidperl". ffoorrmmaatt In addition to bug fixes, "format"'s features have been enhanced. See perlform MMoodduulleess aanndd PPrraaggmmaattaa The (mis)use of "/tmp" in core modules and documentation has been

tidied up. Some modules available both within the perl core and inde-

pendently from CPAN ("dual-life modules") have not yet had these

changes applied; the changes will be integrated into future stable perl releases as the modules are updated on CPAN. UUppddaatteedd mmoodduulleess Attribute::Handlers B Benchmark CGI Carp Cwd Exporter File::Find IO IPC::Open3 Local::Maketext Math::BigFloat Math::BigInt Math::BigRat MIME::Base64 ODBMFile POSIX Shell Socket

There is experimental support for Linux abstract Unix domain sock-

ets. 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 PPeerrffoorrmmaannccee EEnnhhaanncceemmeennttss +o Accelerated Unicode case mappings ("/i", "lc", "uc", etc). +o In place sort optimised (eg "@a = sort @a") +o Unnecessary assignment optimised away in

my $s = undef;

my @a = ();

my %h = ();

+o Optimised "map" in scalar context UUttiilliittyy CChhaannggeess The Perl debugger (lib/perl5db.pl) can now save all debugger commands for sourcing later, and can display the parent inheritance tree of a given class. IInnssttaallllaattiioonn aanndd CCoonnffiigguurraattiioonn IImmpprroovveemmeennttss The build process on both VMS and Windows has had several minor improvements made. On Windows Borland's C compiler can now compile perl with PerlIO and/or USELARGEFILES enabled. "perl.exe" on Windows now has a "Camel" logo icon. The use of a camel with the topic of Perl is a trademark of O'Reilly and Associates Inc.,

and is used with their permission (ie distribution of the source, com-

piling a Windows executable from it, and using that executable

locally). Use of the supplied camel for anything other than a perl exe-

cutable's icon is specifically not covered, and anyone wishing to redistribute perl binaries with the icon should check directly with O'Reilly beforehand. Perl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more. SSeelleecctteedd BBuugg FFiixxeess More utf8 bugs fixed, notably in how "chomp", "chop", "send", and

"syswrite" and interact with utf8 data. Concatenation now works cor-

rectly when "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 and has

always referred to $::x)

The "const in void context" warning has been suppressed for a constant

in an optimised-away boolean expression such as "5 || print;"

"perl -i" could "fchmod(stdin)" by mistake. This is serious if stdin is

attached to a terminal, and perl is running as root. Now fixed. NNeeww oorr CChhaannggeedd DDiiaaggnnoossttiiccss "Carp" and the internal diagnostic routines used by "Devel::Peek" have been made clearer, as described in "Incompatible Changes" CChhaannggeedd IInntteerrnnaallss Some bugs have been fixed in the hash internals. Restricted hashes and their place holders are now allocated and deleted at slightly different times, but this should not be visible to user code. FFuuttuurree DDiirreeccttiioonnss Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.5) will be on 30th June 2004, with release by mid July. PPllaattffoorrmm SSppeecciiffiicc PPrroobblleemmss This release is known not to build on Windows 95. RReeppoorrttiinngg BBuuggss 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 ppeerrllbbuugg pro-

gram 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/