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.

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
       "\x" notation, rather than octal. This might just confuse non-robust tools which parse the output of modules such as
       Devel::Peek.

Core Enhancements
   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.

   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.

   suidperl less insecure
       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" 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 "sudo" in preference to "suidperl".

   format
       In addition to bug fixes, "format"'s features have been enhanced. See perlform

Modules and Pragmata
       The (mis)use of "/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.

   Updated modules
       Attribute::Handlers
       B
       Benchmark
       CGI
       Carp
       Cwd
       Exporter
       File::Find
       IO
       IPC::Open3
       Local::Maketext
       Math::BigFloat
       Math::BigInt
       Math::BigRat
       MIME::Base64
       ODBM_File
       POSIX
       Shell
       Socket
           There is experimental support for Linux abstract Unix domain sockets.

       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

Performance Enhancements
       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

Utility Changes
       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.

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.

       "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 with the icon should check directly with
       O'Reilly beforehand.

       Perl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more.

Selected Bug Fixes
       More utf8 bugs fixed, notably in how "chomp", "chop", "send", and "syswrite" and interact with utf8 data. Concatenation
       now works correctly 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.

New or Changed Diagnostics
       "Carp" and the internal diagnostic routines used by "Devel::Peek" have been made clearer, as described in "Incompatible
       Changes"

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.

Future Directions
       Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.5) will be on 30th June 2004, with release by mid July.

Platform Specific Problems
       This release is known not to build on Windows 95.

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 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 perlbugATperl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team.  You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at
       http://bugs.perl.org/

SEE ALSO
       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.



perl v5.12.4                                               2011-06-01                                            PERL584DELTA(1)