| =head1 NAME |
| |
| perl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4 |
| |
| =head1 DESCRIPTION |
| |
| This document describes differences between the 5.8.3 release and |
| the 5.8.4 release. |
| |
| =head1 Incompatible Changes |
| |
| Many minor bugs have been fixed. Scripts which happen to rely on previously |
| 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 characters |
| such as newline and backspace are output in C<\x> notation, rather than |
| octal. This might just confuse non-robust tools which parse the output of |
| modules such as Devel::Peek. |
| |
| =head1 Core Enhancements |
| |
| =head2 Malloc wrapping |
| |
| Perl can now be built to detect attempts to assign pathologically large chunks |
| of memory. Previously such assignments would suffer from integer 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. |
| |
| =head2 Unicode Character Database 4.0.1 |
| |
| The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has |
| been updated to 4.0.1 from 4.0.0. |
| |
| =head2 suidperl less insecure |
| |
| Paul Szabo has analysed and patched C<suidperl> to remove existing known |
| insecurities. Currently there are no known holes in C<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 C<sperl5.8.>I<n> (C<sperl5.8.4> for this release). C<suidperl> |
| is installed as a hard link to C<perl>; both C<suidperl> and C<perl> will |
| invoke C<sperl5.8.4> automatically the set uid binary, so this change should |
| be completely transparent. |
| |
| For new projects the core perl team would strongly recommend that you use |
| dedicated, single purpose security tools such as C<sudo> in preference to |
| C<suidperl>. |
| |
| =head2 format |
| |
| In addition to bug fixes, C<format>'s features have been enhanced. See |
| L<perlform> |
| |
| =head1 Modules and Pragmata |
| |
| The (mis)use of C</tmp> in core modules and documentation has been tidied up. |
| Some modules available both within the perl core and independently 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. |
| |
| =head2 Updated modules |
| |
| =over 4 |
| |
| =item Attribute::Handlers |
| |
| =item B |
| |
| =item Benchmark |
| |
| =item CGI |
| |
| =item Carp |
| |
| =item Cwd |
| |
| =item Exporter |
| |
| =item File::Find |
| |
| =item IO |
| |
| =item IPC::Open3 |
| |
| =item Local::Maketext |
| |
| =item Math::BigFloat |
| |
| =item Math::BigInt |
| |
| =item Math::BigRat |
| |
| =item MIME::Base64 |
| |
| =item ODBM_File |
| |
| =item POSIX |
| |
| =item Shell |
| |
| =item Socket |
| |
| There is experimental support for Linux abstract Unix domain sockets. |
| |
| =item Storable |
| |
| =item Switch |
| |
| Synced with its CPAN version 2.10 |
| |
| =item Sys::Syslog |
| |
| C<syslog()> can now use numeric constants for facility names and priorities, |
| in addition to strings. |
| |
| =item Term::ANSIColor |
| |
| =item Time::HiRes |
| |
| =item Unicode::UCD |
| |
| =item Win32 |
| |
| Win32.pm/Win32.xs has moved from the libwin32 module to core Perl |
| |
| =item base |
| |
| =item open |
| |
| =item threads |
| |
| Detached threads are now also supported on Windows. |
| |
| =item utf8 |
| |
| =back |
| |
| =head1 Performance Enhancements |
| |
| =over 4 |
| |
| =item * |
| |
| Accelerated Unicode case mappings (C</i>, C<lc>, C<uc>, etc). |
| |
| =item * |
| |
| In place sort optimised (eg C<@a = sort @a>) |
| |
| =item * |
| |
| Unnecessary assignment optimised away in |
| |
| my $s = undef; |
| my @a = (); |
| my %h = (); |
| |
| =item * |
| |
| Optimised C<map> in scalar context |
| |
| =back |
| |
| =head1 Utility Changes |
| |
| The Perl debugger (F<lib/perl5db.pl>) can now save all debugger commands for |
| sourcing later, and can display the parent inheritance tree of a given class. |
| |
| =head1 Installation and Configuration Improvements |
| |
| 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 |
| USE_LARGE_FILES enabled. |
| |
| C<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, compiling a Windows |
| executable from it, and using that executable locally). Use of the supplied |
| camel for anything other than a perl executable's icon is specifically not |
| covered, and anyone wishing to redistribute perl binaries I<with> the icon |
| should check directly with O'Reilly beforehand. |
| |
| Perl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more. |
| |
| =head1 Selected Bug Fixes |
| |
| More utf8 bugs fixed, notably in how C<chomp>, C<chop>, C<send>, and |
| C<syswrite> and interact with utf8 data. Concatenation now works correctly |
| when C<use bytes;> is in scope. |
| |
| Pragmata are now correctly propagated into (?{...}) constructions in regexps. |
| Code such as |
| |
| my $x = qr{ ... (??{ $x }) ... }; |
| |
| will now (correctly) fail under use strict. (As the inner C<$x> is and |
| has always referred to C<$::x>) |
| |
| The "const in void context" warning has been suppressed for a constant in an |
| optimised-away boolean expression such as C<5 || print;> |
| |
| C<perl -i> could C<fchmod(stdin)> by mistake. This is serious if stdin is |
| attached to a terminal, and perl is running as root. Now fixed. |
| |
| =head1 New or Changed Diagnostics |
| |
| C<Carp> and the internal diagnostic routines used by C<Devel::Peek> have been |
| made clearer, as described in L</Incompatible Changes> |
| |
| =head1 Changed Internals |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| =head1 Future Directions |
| |
| Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.5) will be on 30th June |
| 2004, with release by mid July. |
| |
| =head1 Platform Specific Problems |
| |
| This release is known not to build on Windows 95. |
| |
| =head1 Reporting Bugs |
| |
| 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 B<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 C<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/ |
| |
| =head1 SEE ALSO |
| |
| The F<Changes> file for exhaustive details on what changed. |
| |
| The F<INSTALL> file for how to build Perl. |
| |
| The F<README> file for general stuff. |
| |
| The F<Artistic> and F<Copying> files for copyright information. |
| |
| =cut |