perl587delta (1) Linux Manual Page
NAME
perl587delta – what is new for perl v5.8.7
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.8.6 release and the 5.8.7 release.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.6.
Core Enhancements
Unicode Character Database 4.1.0
The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has been updated to 4.1.0 from 4.0.1. See <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.1.0/#NotableChanges> for the notable changes.
suidperl less insecure
A pair of exploits in "suidperl" involving debugging code have been closed.
For new projects the core perl team strongly recommends that you use dedicated, single purpose security tools such as "sudo" in preference to "suidperl".
Optional site customization script
The perl interpreter can be built to allow the use of a site customization script. By default this is not enabled, to be consistent with previous perl releases. To use this, add "-Dusesitecustomize" to the command line flags when running the "Configure" script. See also “-f” in perlrun.
Config.pm is now much smaller.
"Config.pm" is now about 3K rather than 32K, with the infrequently used code and %Config values loaded on demand. This is transparent to the programmer, but means that most code will save parsing and loading 29K of script (for example, code that uses "File::Find").
Modules and Pragmata
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- B upgraded to version 1.09
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- base upgraded to version 2.07
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- bignum upgraded to version 0.17
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- bytes upgraded to version 1.02
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- Carp upgraded to version 1.04
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- CGI upgraded to version 3.10
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- Class::ISA upgraded to version 0.33
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- Data::Dumper upgraded to version 2.121_02
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- DB_File upgraded to version 1.811
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- Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.06
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- Digest upgraded to version 1.10
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- Encode upgraded to version 2.10
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- FileCache upgraded to version 1.05
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- File::Path upgraded to version 1.07
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- File::Temp upgraded to version 0.16
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- IO::File upgraded to version 1.11
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- IO::Socket upgraded to version 1.28
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- Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.77
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- Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.15
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- overload upgraded to version 1.03
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- PathTools upgraded to version 3.05
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- Pod::HTML upgraded to version 1.0503
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- Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.14
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- Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.58
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- Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.30
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- Symbol upgraded to version 1.06
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- Term::ANSIColor upgraded to version 1.09
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- Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.48
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- Test::Simple upgraded to version 0.54
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- Text::Wrap upgraded to version 2001.09293, to fix a bug when
wrap()was called with a non-space separator. - •
- threads::shared upgraded to version 0.93
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- Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.66
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- Time::Local upgraded to version 1.11
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- Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.32
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- utf8 upgraded to version 1.05
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- Win32 upgraded to version 0.24, which provides Win32::GetFileVersion
Utility Changes
find2perl enhancements
"find2perl" has new options "-iname", "-path" and "-ipath".
Performance Enhancements
The internal pointer mapping hash used during ithreads cloning now uses an arena for memory allocation. In tests this reduced ithreads cloning time by about 10%.
Installation and Configuration Improvements
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- The Win32 “dmake” makefile.mk has been updated to make it compatible with the latest versions of dmake.
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- "PERL_MALLOC", "DEBUG_MSTATS", "PERL_HASH_SEED_EXPLICIT" and "NO_HASH_SEED" should now work in Win32 makefiles.
Selected Bug Fixes
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- The
socket()function on Win32 has been fixed so that it is able to use transport providers which specify a protocol of 0 (meaning any protocol is allowed) once more. (This was broken in 5.8.6, and typically caused the use of ICMP sockets to fail.) - •
- Another obscure bug involving "substr" and UTF-8 caused by bad internal offset caching has been identified and fixed.
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- A bug involving the loading of UTF-8 tables by the regexp engine has been fixed – code such as ""