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perl589delta (1)

Name

perl589delta - what is new for perl v5.8.9

Synopsis

Please see following description for synopsis

Description




Perl Programmers Reference Guide                  PERL589DELTA(1)



NAME
     perl589delta - what is new for perl v5.8.9

DESCRIPTION
     This document describes differences between the 5.8.8
     release and the 5.8.9 release.

Notice
     The 5.8.9 release will be the last significant release of
     the 5.8.x series. Any future releases of 5.8.x will likely
     only be to deal with security issues, and platform build
     failures. Hence you should look to migrating to 5.10.x, if
     you have not started already.  See "Known Problems" for more
     information.

Incompatible Changes
     A particular construction in the source code of extensions
     written in C++ may need changing. See "Changed Internals"
     for more details. All extensions written in C, most written
     in C++, and all existing compiled extensions are unaffected.
     This was necessary to improve C++ support.

     Other than this, there are no changes intentionally
     incompatible with 5.8.8.  If any exist, they are bugs and
     reports are welcome.

Core Enhancements
  Unicode Character Database 5.1.0.
     The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl
     5.8 has been updated to 5.1.0 from 4.1.0. See
     <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/#NotableChanges>
     for the notable changes.

  stat and -X on directory handles
     It is now possible to call "stat" and the "-X" filestat
     operators on directory handles. As both directory and file
     handles are barewords, there can be ambiguities over which
     was intended. In these situations the file handle semantics
     are preferred. Both also treat *FILE{IO} filehandles like
     *FILE filehandles.

  Source filters in @INC
     It's possible to enhance the mechanism of subroutine hooks
     in @INC by adding a source filter on top of the filehandle
     opened and returned by the hook. This feature was planned a
     long time ago, but wasn't quite working until now. See
     "require" in perlfunc for details. (Nicholas Clark)

  Exceptions in constant folding
     The constant folding routine is now wrapped in an exception
     handler, and if folding throws an exception (such as
     attempting to evaluate 0/0), perl now retains the current



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     optree, rather than aborting the whole program.  Without
     this change, programs would not compile if they had
     expressions that happened to generate exceptions, even
     though those expressions were in code that could never be
     reached at runtime. (Nicholas Clark, Dave Mitchell)

  "no VERSION"
     You can now use "no" followed by a version number to specify
     that you want to use a version of perl older than the
     specified one.

  Improved internal UTF-8 caching code
     The code that caches calculated UTF-8 byte offsets for
     character offsets for a string has been re-written. Several
     bugs have been located and eliminated, and the code now
     makes better use of the information it has, so should be
     faster. In particular, it doesn't scan to the end of a
     string before calculating an offset within the string, which
     should speed up some operations on long strings. It is now
     possible to disable the caching code at run time, to verify
     that it is not the cause of suspected problems.

  Runtime relocatable installations
     There is now Configure support for creating a perl tree that
     is relocatable at run time. see "Relocatable installations".

  New internal variables
     "${^CHILD_ERROR_NATIVE}"
         This variable gives the native status returned by the
         last pipe close, backtick command, successful call to
         "wait" or "waitpid", or from the "system" operator. See
         perlvar for details. (Contributed by Gisle Aas.)

     "${^UTF8CACHE}"
         This variable controls the state of the internal UTF-8
         offset caching code.  1 for on (the default), 0 for off,
         -1 to debug the caching code by checking all its results
         against linear scans, and panicing on any discrepancy.

  "readpipe" is now overridable
     The built-in function "readpipe" is now overridable.
     Overriding it permits also to override its operator
     counterpart, "qx//" (also known as "``").

  simple exception handling macros
     Perl 5.8.9 (and 5.10.0 onwards) now provides a couple of
     macros to do very basic exception handling in XS modules.
     You can use these macros if you call code that may "croak",
     but you need to do some cleanup before giving control back
     to Perl. See "Exception Handling" in perlguts for more
     details.




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  -D option enhancements
     o   "-Dq" suppresses the EXECUTING... message when running
         under "-D"

     o   "-Dl" logs runops loop entry and exit, and jump level
         popping.

     o   "-Dv" displays the process id as part of the trace
         output.

  XS-assisted SWASHGET
     Some pure-perl code that the regexp engine was using to
     retrieve Unicode properties and transliteration mappings has
     been reimplemented in XS for faster execution.  (SADAHIRO
     Tomoyuki)

  Constant subroutines
     The interpreter internals now support a far more memory
     efficient form of inlineable constants. Storing a reference
     to a constant value in a symbol table is equivalent to a
     full typeglob referencing a constant subroutine, but using
     about 400 bytes less memory. This proxy constant subroutine
     is automatically upgraded to a real typeglob with subroutine
     if necessary.  The approach taken is analogous to the
     existing space optimisation for subroutine stub
     declarations, which are stored as plain scalars in place of
     the full typeglob.

     However, to aid backwards compatibility of existing code,
     which (wrongly) does not expect anything other than
     typeglobs in symbol tables, nothing in core uses this
     feature, other than the regression tests.

     Stubs for prototyped subroutines have been stored in symbol
     tables as plain strings, and stubs for unprototyped
     subroutines as the number -1, since 5.005, so code which
     assumes that the core only places typeglobs in symbol tables
     has been making incorrect assumptions for over 10 years.

New Platforms
     Compile support added for:

     o   DragonFlyBSD

     o   MidnightBSD

     o   MirOS BSD

     o   RISC OS

     o   Cray XT4/Catamount




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Modules and Pragmata
  New Modules
     o   "Module::Pluggable" is a simple framework to create
         modules that accept pluggable sub-modules. The bundled
         version is 3.8

     o   "Module::CoreList" is a hash of hashes that is keyed on
         perl version as indicated in $]. The bundled version is
         2.17

     o   "Win32API::File" now available in core on Microsoft
         Windows. The bundled version is 0.1001_01

     o   "Devel::InnerPackage" finds all the packages defined by
         a single file. It is part of the "Module::Pluggable"
         distribution. The bundled version is 0.3

  Updated Modules
     o   "attributes" upgraded to version 0.09

     o   "AutoLoader" upgraded to version 5.67

     o   "AutoSplit" upgraded to 1.06

     o   "autouse" upgraded to version 1.06

     o   "B" upgraded from 1.09_01 to 1.19

         o   provides new pad related abstraction macros
             "B::NV::COP_SEQ_RANGE_LOW",
             "B::NV::COP_SEQ_RANGE_HIGH",
             "B::NV::PARENT_PAD_INDEX",
             "B::NV::PARENT_FAKELEX_FLAGS", which hides the
             difference in storage in 5.10.0 and later.

         o   provides "B::sub_generation", which exposes
             "PL_sub_generation"

         o   provides "B::GV::isGV_with_GP", which on pre-5.10
             perls always returns true.

         o   New type "B::HE" added with methods "VAL", "HASH"
             and "SVKEY_force"

         o   The "B::GVf_IMPORTED_CV" flag is now set correctly
             when a proxy constant subroutine is imported.

         o   bugs fixed in the handling of "PMOP"s.

         o   "B::BM::PREVIOUS" returns now "U32", not "U16".
             "B::CV::START" and "B:CV::ROOT" return now "NULL" on
             an XSUB, "B::CV::XSUB" and "B::CV::XSUBANY" return 0



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             on a non-XSUB.

     o   "B::C" upgraded to 1.05

     o   "B::Concise" upgraded to 0.76

         o   new option "-src" causes the rendering of each
             statement (starting with the nextstate OP) to be
             preceded by the first line of source code that
             generates it.

         o   new option "-stash="somepackage"", "require"s
             "somepackage", and then renders each function
             defined in its namespace.

         o   now has documentation of detailed hint symbols.

     o   "B::Debug" upgraded to version 1.05

     o   "B::Deparse" upgraded to version 0.87

         o   properly deparse "print readpipe $x, $y".

         o   now handles "''-"()>, "::()", "sub :: {}", etc.
             correctly [RT #43010].  All bugs in parsing these
             kinds of syntax are now fixed:

                 perl -MO=Deparse -e '"my %h = "->()'
                 perl -MO=Deparse -e '::->()'
                 perl -MO=Deparse -e 'sub :: {}'
                 perl -MO=Deparse -e 'package a; sub a::b::c {}'
                 perl -MO=Deparse -e 'sub the::main::road {}'

         o   does not deparse $^H{v_string}, which is
             automatically set by the internals.

     o   "B::Lint" upgraded to version 1.11

     o   "B::Terse" upgraded to version 1.05

     o   "base" upgraded to version 2.13

         o   loading a module via base.pm would mask a global
             $SIG{__DIE__} in that module.

         o   push all classes at once in @ISA

     o   "Benchmark" upgraded to version 1.10

     o   "bigint" upgraded to 0.23

     o   "bignum" upgraded to 0.23



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     o   "bigrat" upgraded to 0.23

     o   "blib" upgraded to 0.04

     o   "Carp" upgraded to version 1.10

         The argument backtrace code now shows "undef" as
         "undef", instead of a string "undef".

     o   "CGI" upgraded to version 3.42

     o   "charnames" upgraded to 1.06

     o   "constant" upgraded to version 1.17

     o   "CPAN" upgraded to version 1.9301

     o   "Cwd" upgraded to version 3.29 with some platform
         specific improvements (including for VMS).

     o   "Data::Dumper" upgraded to version 2.121_17

         o   Fixes hash iterator current position with the pure
             Perl version [RT #40668]

         o   Performance enhancements, which will be most evident
             on platforms where repeated calls to C's "realloc()"
             are slow, such as Win32.

     o   "DB_File" upgraded to version 1.817

     o   "DB_Filter" upgraded to version 0.02

     o   "Devel::DProf" upgraded to version 20080331.00

     o   "Devel::Peek" upgraded to version 1.04

     o   "Devel::PPPort" upgraded to version 3.14

     o   "diagnostics" upgraded to version 1.16

     o   "Digest" upgraded to version 1.15

     o   "Digest::MD5" upgraded to version 2.37

     o   "DirHandle" upgraded to version 1.02

         o   now localises $., $@, $!, $^E, and $? before closing
             the directory handle to suppress leaking any side
             effects of warnings about it already being closed.

     o   "DynaLoader" upgraded to version 1.09



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         "DynaLoader" can now dynamically load a loadable object
         from a file with a non-default file extension.

     o   "Encode" upgraded to version 2.26

         "Encode::Alias" includes a fix for encoding "646" on
         Solaris (better known as ASCII).

     o   "English" upgraded to version 1.03

     o   "Errno" upgraded to version 1.10

     o   "Exporter" upgraded to version 5.63

     o   "ExtUtils::Command" upgraded to version 1.15

     o   "ExtUtils::Constant" upgraded to version 0.21

     o   "ExtUtils::Embed" upgraded to version 1.28

     o   "ExtUtils::Install" upgraded to version 1.50_01

     o   "ExtUtils::Installed" upgraded to version 1.43

     o   "ExtUtils::MakeMaker" upgraded to version 6.48

         o   support for "INSTALLSITESCRIPT" and
             "INSTALLVENDORSCRIPT" configuration.

     o   "ExtUtils::Manifest" upgraded to version 1.55

     o   "ExtUtils::ParseXS" upgraded to version 2.19

     o   "Fatal" upgraded to version 1.06

         o   allows built-ins in "CORE::GLOBAL" to be made fatal.

     o   "Fcntl" upgraded to version 1.06

     o   "fields" upgraded to version 2.12

     o   "File::Basename" upgraded to version 2.77

     o   "FileCache" upgraded to version 1.07

     o   "File::Compare" upgraded to 1.1005

     o   "File::Copy" upgraded to 2.13

         o   now uses 3-arg open.

     o   "File::DosGlob" upgraded to 1.01



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     o   "File::Find" upgraded to version 1.13

     o   "File::Glob" upgraded to version 1.06

         o   fixes spurious results with brackets inside braces.

     o   "File::Path" upgraded to version 2.07_02

     o   "File::Spec" upgraded to version 3.29

         o   improved handling of bad arguments.

         o   some platform specific improvements (including for
             VMS and Cygwin), with an optimisation on "abs2rel"
             when handling both relative arguments.

     o   "File::stat" upgraded to version 1.01

     o   "File::Temp" upgraded to version 0.20

     o   "filetest" upgraded to version 1.02

     o   "Filter::Util::Call" upgraded to version 1.07

     o   "Filter::Simple" upgraded to version 0.83

     o   "FindBin" upgraded to version 1.49

     o   "GDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.09

     o   "Getopt::Long" upgraded to version 2.37

     o   "Getopt::Std" upgraded to version 1.06

     o   "Hash::Util" upgraded to version 0.06

     o   "if" upgraded to version 0.05

     o   "IO" upgraded to version 1.23

         Reduced number of calls to "getpeername" in "IO::Socket"

     o   "IPC::Open" upgraded to version 1.03

     o   "IPC::Open3" upgraded to version 1.03

     o   "IPC::SysV" upgraded to version 2.00

     o   "lib" upgraded to version 0.61

         o   avoid warning about loading .par files.




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     o   "libnet" upgraded to version 1.22

     o   "List::Util" upgraded to 1.19

     o   "Locale::Maketext" upgraded to 1.13

     o   "Math::BigFloat" upgraded to version 1.60

     o   "Math::BigInt" upgraded to version 1.89

     o   "Math::BigRat" upgraded to version 0.22

         o   implements new "as_float" method.

     o   "Math::Complex" upgraded to version 1.54.

     o   "Math::Trig" upgraded to version 1.18.

     o   "NDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.07

         o   improve g++ handling for systems using GDBM
             compatibility headers.

     o   "Net::Ping" upgraded to version 2.35

     o   "NEXT" upgraded to version 0.61

         o   fix several bugs with "NEXT" when working with
             "AUTOLOAD", "eval" block, and within overloaded
             stringification.

     o   "ODBM_File" upgraded to 1.07

     o   "open" upgraded to 1.06

     o   "ops" upgraded to 1.02

     o   "PerlIO::encoding" upgraded to version 0.11

     o   "PerlIO::scalar" upgraded to version 0.06

         o   [RT #40267] "PerlIO::scalar" doesn't respect
             readonly-ness.

     o   "PerlIO::via" upgraded to version 0.05

     o   "Pod::Html" upgraded to version 1.09

     o   "Pod::Parser" upgraded to version 1.35

     o   "Pod::Usage" upgraded to version 1.35




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     o   "POSIX" upgraded to version 1.15

         o   "POSIX" constants that duplicate those in "Fcntl"
             are now imported from "Fcntl" and re-exported,
             rather than being duplicated by "POSIX"

         o   "POSIX::remove" can remove empty directories.

         o   "POSIX::setlocale" safer to call multiple times.

         o   "POSIX::SigRt" added, which provides access to POSIX
             realtime signal functionality on systems that
             support it.

     o   "re" upgraded to version 0.06_01

     o   "Safe" upgraded to version 2.16

     o   "Scalar::Util" upgraded to 1.19

     o   "SDBM_File" upgraded to version 1.06

     o   "SelfLoader" upgraded to version 1.17

     o   "Shell" upgraded to version 0.72

     o   "sigtrap" upgraded to version 1.04

     o   "Socket" upgraded to version 1.81

         o   this fixes an optimistic use of "gethostbyname"

     o   "Storable" upgraded to 2.19

     o   "Switch" upgraded to version 2.13

     o   "Sys::Syslog" upgraded to version 0.27

     o   "Term::ANSIColor" upgraded to version 1.12

     o   "Term::Cap" upgraded to version 1.12

     o   "Term::ReadLine" upgraded to version 1.03

     o   "Test::Builder" upgraded to version 0.80

     o   "Test::Harness" upgraded version to 2.64

         o   this makes it able to handle newlines.

     o   "Test::More" upgraded to version 0.80




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     o   "Test::Simple" upgraded to version 0.80

     o   "Text::Balanced" upgraded to version 1.98

     o   "Text::ParseWords" upgraded to version 3.27

     o   "Text::Soundex" upgraded to version 3.03

     o   "Text::Tabs" upgraded to version 2007.1117

     o   "Text::Wrap" upgraded to version 2006.1117

     o   "Thread" upgraded to version 2.01

     o   "Thread::Semaphore" upgraded to version 2.09

     o   "Thread::Queue" upgraded to version 2.11

         o   added capability to add complex structures (e.g.,
             hash of hashes) to queues.

         o   added capability to dequeue multiple items at once.

         o   added new methods to inspect and manipulate queues:
             "peek", "insert" and "extract"

     o   "Tie::Handle" upgraded to version 4.2

     o   "Tie::Hash" upgraded to version 1.03

     o   "Tie::Memoize" upgraded to version 1.1

         o   "Tie::Memoize::EXISTS" now correctly caches its
             results.

     o   "Tie::RefHash" upgraded to version 1.38

     o   "Tie::Scalar" upgraded to version 1.01

     o   "Tie::StdHandle" upgraded to version 4.2

     o   "Time::gmtime" upgraded to version 1.03

     o   "Time::Local" upgraded to version 1.1901

     o   "Time::HiRes" upgraded to version 1.9715 with various
         build improvements (including VMS) and minor platform-
         specific bug fixes (including for HP-UX 11 ia64).

     o   "threads" upgraded to 1.71

         o   new thread state information methods: "is_running",



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             "is_detached" and "is_joinable".  "list" method
             enhanced to return running or joinable threads.

         o   new thread signal method: "kill"

         o   added capability to specify thread stack size.

         o   added capability to control thread exiting behavior.
             Added a new "exit" method.

     o   "threads::shared" upgraded to version 1.27

         o   smaller and faster implementation that eliminates
             one internal structure and the consequent level of
             indirection.

         o   user locks are now stored in a safer manner.

         o   new function "shared_clone" creates a copy of an
             object leaving shared elements as-is and deep-
             cloning non-shared elements.

         o   added new "is_shared" method.

     o   "Unicode::Normalize" upgraded to version 1.02

     o   "Unicode::UCD" upgraded to version 0.25

     o   "warnings" upgraded to version 1.05_01

     o   "Win32" upgraded to version 0.38

         o   added new function "GetCurrentProcessId" which
             returns the regular Windows process identifier of
             the current process, even when called from within a
             fork.

     o   "XSLoader" upgraded to version 0.10

     o   "XS::APItest" and "XS::Typemap" are for internal use
         only and hence no longer installed. Many more tests have
         been added to "XS::APItest".

Utility Changes
  debugger upgraded to version 1.31
     o   Andreas Koenig contributed two functions to save and
         load the debugger history.

     o   "NEXT::AUTOLOAD" no longer emits warnings under the
         debugger.

     o   The debugger should now correctly find tty the device on



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         OS X 10.5 and VMS when the program "fork"s.

     o   LVALUE subs now work inside the debugger.

  perlthanks
     Perl 5.8.9 adds a new utility perlthanks, which is a variant
     of perlbug, but for sending non-bug-reports to the authors
     and maintainers of Perl.  Getting nothing but bug reports
     can become a bit demoralising - we'll see if this changes
     things.

  perlbug
     perlbug now checks if you're reporting about a non-core
     module and suggests you report it to the CPAN author
     instead.

  h2xs
     o   won't define an empty string as a constant [RT #25366]

     o   has examples for "h2xs -X"

  h2ph
     o   now attempts to deal sensibly with the difference in
         path implications between "" and "<>" quoting in
         "#include" statements.

     o   now generates correct code for "#if defined A || defined
         B" [RT #39130]

New Documentation
     As usual, the documentation received its share of
     corrections, clarifications and other nitfixes. More "" tags
     were added for indexing.

     perlunitut is a tutorial written by Juerd Waalboer on
     Unicode-related terminology and how to correctly handle
     Unicode in Perl scripts.

     perlunicode is updated in section user defined properties.

     perluniintro has been updated in the example of detecting
     data that is not valid in particular encoding.

     perlcommunity provides an overview of the Perl Community
     along with further resources.

     CORE documents the pseudo-namespace for Perl's core
     routines.

Changes to Existing Documentation
     perlglossary adds deprecated modules and features and to be
     dropped modules.



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     perlhack has been updated and added resources on smoke
     testing.

     The Perl FAQs (perlfaq1..perlfaq9) have been updated.

     perlcheat is updated with better details on "\w", "\d", and
     "\s".

     perldebug is updated with information on how to call the
     debugger.

     perldiag documentation updated with subroutine with an
     ampersand on the argument to "exists" and "delete" and also
     several terminology updates on warnings.

     perlfork documents the limitation of "exec" inside pseudo-
     processes.

     perlfunc:

     o   Documentation is fixed in section "caller" and "pop".

     o   Function "alarm" now mentions "Time::HiRes::ualarm" in
         preference to "select".

     o   Regarding precedence in "-X", filetest operators are the
         same as unary operators, but not regarding parsing and
         parentheses (spotted by Eirik Berg Hanssen).

     o   reverse function documentation received scalar context
         examples.

     perllocale documentation is adjusted for number localization
     and "POSIX::setlocale" to fix Debian bug #379463.

     perlmodlib is updated with "CPAN::API::HOWTO" and
     "Sys::Syslog::win32::Win32"

     perlre documentation updated to reflect the differences
     between "[[:xxxxx:]]" and "\p{IsXxxxx}" matches. Also added
     section on "/g" and "/c" modifiers.

     perlreguts describe the internals of the regular expressions
     engine. It has been contributed by Yves Orton.

     perlrebackslash describes all perl regular expression
     backslash and escape sequences.

     perlrecharclass describes the syntax and use of character
     classes in Perl Regular Expressions.





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     perlrun is updated to clarify on the hash seed
     PERL_HASH_SEED. Also more information in options "-x" and
     "-u".

     perlsub example is updated to use a lexical variable for
     "opendir" syntax.

     perlvar fixes confusion about real GID $( and effective GID
     $).

     Perl thread tutorial example is fixed in section "Queues:
     Passing Data Around" in perlthrtut and perlothrtut.

     perlhack documentation extensively improved by Jarkko
     Hietaniemi and others.

     perltoot provides information on modifying @UNIVERSAL::ISA.

     perlport documentation extended to include different
     "kill(-9, ...)"  semantics on Windows. It also clearly
     states "dump" is not supported on Win32 and cygwin.

     INSTALL has been updated and modernised.

Performance Enhancements
     o   The default since perl 5.000 has been for perl to create
         an empty scalar with every new typeglob. The increased
         use of lexical variables means that most are now unused.
         Thanks to Nicholas Clark's efforts, Perl can now be
         compiled with "-DPERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV" to avoid
         creating these empty scalars.  This will significantly
         decrease the number of scalars allocated for all
         configurations, and the number of scalars that need to
         be copied for ithread creation. Whilst this option is
         binary compatible with existing perl installations, it
         does change a long-standing assumption about the
         internals, hence it is not enabled by default, as some
         third party code may rely on the old behaviour.

         We would recommend testing with this configuration on
         new deployments of perl, particularly for multi-threaded
         servers, to see whether all third party code is
         compatible with it, as this configuration may give
         useful performance improvements. For existing
         installations we would not recommend changing to this
         configuration unless thorough testing is performed
         before deployment.

     o   "diagnostics" no longer uses $&, which results in large
         speedups for regexp matching in all code using it.

     o   Regular expressions classes of a single character are



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         now treated the same as if the character had been used
         as a literal, meaning that code that uses char-classes
         as an escaping mechanism will see a speedup. (Yves
         Orton)

     o   Creating anonymous array and hash references (ie. "[]"
         and "{}") now incurs no more overhead than creating an
         anonymous list or hash. Nicholas Clark provided changes
         with a saving of two ops and one stack push, which was
         measured as a slightly better than 5% improvement for
         these operations.

     o   Many calls to "strlen()" have been eliminated, either
         because the length was already known, or by adopting or
         enhancing APIs that pass lengths. This has been aided by
         the adoption of a "my_sprintf()" wrapper, which returns
         the correct C89 value - the length of the formatted
         string. Previously we could not rely on the return value
         of "sprintf()", because on some ancient but extant
         platforms it still returns "char *".

     o   "index" is now faster if the search string is stored in
         UTF-8 but only contains characters in the Latin-1 range.

     o   The Unicode swatch cache inside the regexp engine is now
         used. (the lookup had a key mismatch, present since the
         initial implementation). [RT #42839]

Installation and Configuration Improvements
  Relocatable installations
     There is now Configure support for creating a relocatable
     perl tree. If you Configure with "-Duserelocatableinc", then
     the paths in @INC (and everything else in %Config) can be
     optionally located via the path of the perl executable.

     At start time, if any paths in @INC or "Config" that
     Configure marked as relocatable (by starting them with
     ".../"), then they are prefixed the directory of $^X. This
     allows the relocation can be configured on a per-directory
     basis, although the default with "-Duserelocatableinc" is
     that everything is relocated. The initial install is done to
     the original configured prefix.

  Configuration improvements
     Configure is now better at removing temporary files. Tom
     Callaway (from RedHat) also contributed patches that
     complete the set of flags passed to the compiler and the
     linker, in particular that "-fPIC" is now enabled on Linux.
     It will also croak when your /dev/null isn't a device.

     A new configuration variable "d_pseudofork" has been to
     Configure, and is available as  $Config{d_pseudofork} in the



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     "Config" module. This distinguishes real "fork" support from
     the pseudofork emulation used on Windows platforms.

     Config.pod and config.sh are now placed correctly for cross-
     compilation.

     $Config{useshrplib} is now 'true' rather than 'yes' when
     using a shared perl library.

  Compilation improvements
     Parallel makes should work properly now, although there may
     still be problems if "make test" is instructed to run in
     parallel.

     Many compilation warnings have been cleaned up. A very
     stubborn compiler warning in "S_emulate_eaccess()" was
     killed after six attempts.  g++ support has been tuned,
     especially for FreeBSD.

     mkppport has been integrated, and all ppport.h files in the
     core will now be autogenerated at build time (and removed
     during cleanup).

  Installation improvements.
     installman now works with "-Duserelocatableinc" and
     "DESTDIR".

     installperl no longer installs:

     o   static library files of statically linked extensions
         when a shared perl library is being used. (They are not
         needed. See "Windows" below).

     o   SIGNATURE and PAUSE*.pub (CPAN files)

     o   NOTES and PATCHING (ExtUtils files)

     o   perlld and ld2 (Cygwin files)

  Platform Specific Changes
     There are improved hints for AIX, Cygwin, DEC/OSF, FreeBSD,
     HP/UX, Irix 6 Linux, MachTen, NetBSD, OS/390, QNX, SCO,
     Solaris, SunOS, System V Release 5.x (UnixWare 7, OpenUNIX
     8), Ultrix, UMIPS, uts and VOS.

     FreeBSD

     o   Drop "-std=c89" and "-ansi" if using "long long" as the
         main integral type, else in FreeBSD 6.2 (and perhaps
         other releases), system headers do not declare some
         functions required by perl.




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     Solaris

     o   Starting with Solaris 10, we do not want versioned
         shared libraries, because those often indicate a private
         use only library. These problems could often be
         triggered when SUNWbdb (Berkeley DB) was installed.
         Hence if Solaris 10 is detected set
         "ignore_versioned_solibs=y".

     VMS

     o   Allow IEEE math to be deselected on OpenVMS I64 (but it
         remains the default).

     o   Record IEEE usage in "config.h"

     o   Help older VMS compilers by using "ccflags" when
         building "munchconfig.exe".

     o   Don't try to build old "Thread" extension on VMS when
         "-Duseithreads" has been chosen.

     o   Passing a raw string of "NaN" to nawk causes a core dump
         - so the string has been changed to "*NaN*"

     o   t/op/stat.t tests will now test hard links on VMS if
         they are supported.

     Windows

     o   When using a shared perl library installperl no longer
         installs static library files, import library files and
         export library files (of statically linked extensions)
         and empty bootstrap files (of dynamically linked
         extensions). This fixes a problem building PAR-Packer on
         Win32 with a debug build of perl.

     o   Various improvements to the win32 build process,
         including support for Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
         (aka Visual C++ 8.x).

     o   perl.exe will now have an icon if built with MinGW or
         Borland.

     o   Improvements to the perl-static.exe build process.

     o   Add Win32 makefile option to link all extensions
         statically.

     o   The WinCE directory has been merged into the Win32
         directory.




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     o   "setlocale" tests have been re-enabled for Windows XP
         onwards.

Selected Bug Fixes
  Unicode
     Many many bugs related to the internal Unicode
     implementation (UTF-8) have been fixed. In particular, long
     standing bugs related to returning Unicode via "tie",
     overloading or $@ are now gone, some of which were never
     reported.

     "unpack" will internally convert the string back from UTF-8
     on numeric types.  This is a compromise between the full
     consistency now in 5.10, and the current behaviour, which is
     often used as a "feature" on string types.

     Using ":crlf" and "UTF-16" IO layers together will now work.

     Fixed problems with "split", Unicode "/\s+/" and "/ \0/".

     Fixed bug RT #40641 - encoding of Unicode characters in
     regular expressions.

     Fixed a bug where using certain patterns in a regexp led to
     a panic.  [RT #45337]

     Perl no longer segfaults (due to infinite internal
     recursion) if the locale's character is not UTF-8 [RT
     #41442]:

         use open ':locale';
         print STDERR "\x{201e}"; # &bdquo;

  PerlIO
     Inconsistencies have been fixed in the reference counting
     PerlIO uses to keep track of Unix file descriptors, and the
     API used by XS code to manage getting and releasing "FILE
     *"s

  Magic
     Several bugs have been fixed in Magic, the internal system
     used to implement features such as "tie", tainting and
     threads sharing.

     "undef @array" on a tied array now correctly calls the
     "CLEAR" method.

     Some of the bitwise ops were not checking whether their
     arguments were magical before using them. [RT #24816]

     Magic is no longer invoked twice by the expression "\&$x"




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     A bug with assigning large numbers and tainting has been
     resolved.  [RT #40708]

     A new entry has been added to the MAGIC vtable -
     "svt_local". This is used when copying magic to the new
     value during "local", allowing certain problems with
     localising shared variables to be resolved.

     For the implementation details, see "Magic Virtual Tables"
     in perlguts.

  Reblessing overloaded objects now works
     Internally, perl object-ness is on the referent, not the
     reference, even though methods can only be called via a
     reference. However, the original implementation of
     overloading stored flags related to overloading on the
     reference, relying on the flags being copied when the
     reference was copied, or set at the creation of a new
     reference. This manifests in a bug - if you rebless an
     object from a class that has overloading, into one that does
     not, then any other existing references think that they
     (still) point to an overloaded object, choose these C code
     paths, and then throw errors.  Analogously, blessing into an
     overloaded class when other references exist will result in
     them not using overloading.

     The implementation has been fixed for 5.10, but this fix
     changes the semantics of flag bits, so is not binary
     compatible, so can't be applied to 5.8.9.  However, 5.8.9
     has a work-around that implements the same bug fix. If the
     referent has multiple references, then all the other
     references are located and corrected. A full search is
     avoided whenever possible by scanning lexicals outwards from
     the current subroutine, and the argument stack.

     A certain well known Linux vendor applied incomplete
     versions of this bug fix to their /usr/bin/perl and then
     prematurely closed bug reports about performance issues
     without consulting back upstream. This not being enough,
     they then proceeded to ignore the necessary fixes to these
     unreleased changes for 11 months, until massive pressure was
     applied by their long-suffering paying customers, catalysed
     by the failings being featured on a prominent blog and
     Slashdot.

  "strict" now propagates correctly into string evals
     Under 5.8.8 and earlier:

         $ perl5.8.8 -e 'use strict; eval "use foo bar" or die $@'
         Can't locate foo.pm in @INC (@INC contains: ... .) at (eval 1) line 2.
         BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 1) line 2.




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     Under 5.8.9 and later:

         $ perl5.8.9 -e 'use strict; eval "use foo bar" or die $@'
         Bareword "bar" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at (eval 1) line 1.

     This may cause problems with programs that parse the error
     message and rely on the buggy behaviour.

  Other fixes
     o   The tokenizer no longer treats "=cute" (and other words
         beginning with "=cut") as a synonym for "=cut".

     o   Calling "CORE::require"

         "CORE::require" and "CORE::do" were always parsed as
         "require" and "do" when they were overridden. This is
         now fixed.

     o   Stopped memory leak on long /etc/groups entries.

     o   "while (my $x ...) { ...; redo }" shouldn't "undef $x".

         In the presence of "my" in the conditional of a
         "while()", "until()", or "for(;;)" loop, we now add an
         extra scope to the body so that "redo" doesn't "undef"
         the lexical.

     o   The "encoding" pragma now correctly ignores anything
         following an "@" character in the "LC_ALL" and "LANG"
         environment variables. [RT # 49646]

     o   A segfault observed with some gcc 3.3 optimisations is
         resolved.

     o   A possible segfault when "unpack" used in scalar context
         with "()" groups is resolved. [RT #50256]

     o   Resolved issue where $! could be changed by a signal
         handler interrupting a "system" call.

     o   Fixed bug RT #37886, symbolic deferencing was allowed in
         the argument of "defined" even under the influence of
         "use strict 'refs'".

     o   Fixed bug RT #43207, where "lc"/"uc" inside "sort"
         affected the return value.

     o   Fixed bug RT #45607, where "*{"BONK"} = \&{"BONK"}"
         didn't work correctly.

     o   Fixed bug RT #35878, croaking from a XSUB called via
         "goto &xsub" corrupts perl internals.



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     o   Fixed bug RT #32539, DynaLoader.o is moved into
         libperl.so to avoid the need to statically link
         DynaLoader into the stub perl executable. With this
         libperl.so provides everything needed to get a
         functional embedded perl interpreter to run.

     o   Fix bug RT #36267 so that assigning to a tied hash
         doesn't change the underlying hash.

     o   Fix bug RT #6006, regexp replaces using large
         replacement variables fail some of the time, i.e. when
         substitution contains something like "${10}" (note the
         bracket) instead of just $10.

     o   Fix bug RT #45053, "Perl_newCONSTSUB()" is now thread
         safe.

  Platform Specific Fixes
     Darwin / MacOS X

     o   Various improvements to 64 bit builds.

     o   Mutex protection added in "PerlIOStdio_close()" to avoid
         race conditions.  Hopefully this fixes failures in the
         threads tests free.t and blocks.t.

     o   Added forked terminal support to the debugger, with the
         ability to update the window title.

     OS/2

     o   A build problem with specifying "USE_MULTI" and
         "USE_ITHREADS" but without "USE_IMP_SYS" has been fixed.

     o   "OS2::REXX" upgraded to version 1.04

     Tru64

     o   Aligned floating point build policies for cc and gcc.

     RedHat Linux

     o   Revisited a patch from 5.6.1 for RH7.2 for Intel's icc
         [RT #7916], added an additional check for
         $Config{gccversion}.

     Solaris/i386

     o   Use "-DPTR_IS_LONG" when using 64 bit integers

     VMS




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     o   Fixed "PerlIO::Scalar" in-memory file record-style
         reads.

     o   pipe shutdown at process exit should now be more robust.

     o   Bugs in VMS exit handling tickled by "Test::Harness"
         2.64 have been fixed.

     o   Fix "fcntl()" locking capability test in configure.com.

     o   Replaced "shrplib='define'" with "useshrplib='true'" on
         VMS.

     Windows

     o   "File::Find" used to fail when the target directory is a
         bare drive letter and "no_chdir" is 1 (the default is
         0). [RT #41555]

     o   A build problem with specifying "USE_MULTI" and
         "USE_ITHREADS" but without "USE_IMP_SYS" has been fixed.

     o   The process id is no longer truncated to 16 bits on some
         Windows platforms (
         http://bugs.activestate.com/show_bug.cgi?id=72443 )

     o   Fixed bug RT #54828 in perlio.c where calling "binmode"
         on Win32 and Cgywin may cause a segmentation fault.

  Smaller fixes
     o   It is now possible to overload "eq" when using
         "nomethod".

     o   Various problems using "overload" with 64 bit integers
         corrected.

     o   The reference count of "PerlIO" file descriptors is now
         correctly handled.

     o   On VMS, escaped dots will be preserved when converted to
         Unix syntax.

     o   "keys %+" no longer throws an 'ambiguous' warning.

     o   Using "#!perl -d" could trigger an assertion, which has
         been fixed.

     o   Don't stringify tied code references in @INC when
         calling "require".

     o   Code references in @INC report the correct file name
         when "__FILE__" is used.



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     o   Width and precision in sprintf didn't handle characters
         above 255 correctly.  [RT #40473]

     o   List slices with indices out of range now work more
         consistently.  [RT #39882]

     o   A change introduced with perl 5.8.1 broke the parsing of
         arguments of the form "-foo=bar" with the "-s" on the
         <#!> line. This has been fixed. See
         http://bugs.activestate.com/show_bug.cgi?id=43483

     o   "tr///" is now threadsafe. Previously it was storing a
         swash inside its OP, rather than in a pad.

     o   pod2html labels anchors more consistently and handles
         nested definition lists better.

     o   "threads" cleanup veto has been extended to include
         "perl_free()" and "perl_destruct()"

     o   On some systems, changes to $ENV{TZ} would not always be
         respected by the underlying calls to "localtime_r()".
         Perl now forces the inspection of the environment on
         these systems.

     o   The special variable $^R is now more consistently set
         when executing regexps using the "(?{...})" construct.
         In particular, it will still be set even if
         backreferences or optional sub-patterns "(?:...)?" are
         used.

New or Changed Diagnostics
  panic: sv_chop %s
     This new fatal error occurs when the C routine
     "Perl_sv_chop()" was passed a position that is not within
     the scalar's string buffer. This is caused by buggy XS code,
     and at this point recovery is not possible.

  Maximal count of pending signals (%s) exceeded
     This new fatal error occurs when the perl process has to
     abort due to too many pending signals, which is bound to
     prevent perl from being able to handle further incoming
     signals safely.

  panic: attempt to call %s in %s
     This new fatal error occurs when the ACL version file test
     operator is used where it is not available on the current
     platform. Earlier checks mean that it should never be
     possible to get this.

  FETCHSIZE returned a negative value
     New error indicating that a tied array has claimed to have a



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     negative number of elements.

  Can't upgrade %s (%d) to %d
     Previously the internal error from the SV upgrade code was
     the less informative Can't upgrade that kind of scalar. It
     now reports the current internal type, and the new type
     requested.

  %s argument is not a HASH or ARRAY element or a subroutine
     This error, thrown if an invalid argument is provided to
     "exists" now correctly includes "or a subroutine". [RT
     #38955]

  Cannot make the non-overridable builtin %s fatal
     This error in "Fatal" previously did not show the name of
     the builtin in question (now represented by %s above).

  Unrecognized character '%s' in column %d
     This error previously did not state the column.

  Offset outside string
     This can now also be generated by a "seek" on a file handle
     using "PerlIO::scalar".

  Invalid escape in the specified encoding in regexp; marked by
     <-- HERE in m/%s/
     New error, introduced as part of the fix to RT #40641 to
     handle encoding of Unicode characters in regular expression
     comments.

  Your machine doesn't support dump/undump.
     A more informative fatal error issued when calling "dump" on
     Win32 and Cygwin. (Given that the purpose of "dump" is to
     abort with a core dump, and core dumps can't be produced on
     these platforms, this is more useful than silently exiting.)

Changed Internals
     The perl sources can now be compiled with a C++ compiler
     instead of a C compiler. A necessary implementation details
     is that under C++, the macro "XS" used to define XSUBs now
     includes an "extern "C"" definition. A side effect of this
     is that C++ code that used the construction

         typedef XS(SwigPerlWrapper);

     now needs to be written

         typedef XSPROTO(SwigPerlWrapper);

     using the new "XSPROTO" macro, in order to compile. C
     extensions are unaffected, although C extensions are
     encouraged to use "XSPROTO" too.  This change was present in



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     the 5.10.0 release of perl, so any actively maintained code
     that happened to use this construction should already have
     been adapted. Code that needs changing will fail with a
     compilation error.

     "set" magic on localizing/assigning to a magic variable will
     now only trigger for container magics, i.e. it will for %ENV
     or %SIG but not for $#array.

     The new API macro "newSVpvs()" can be used in place of
     constructions such as "newSVpvn("ISA", 3)". It takes a
     single string constant, and at C compile time determines its
     length.

     The new API function "Perl_newSV_type()" can be used as a
     more efficient replacement of the common idiom

         sv = newSV(0);
         sv_upgrade(sv, type);

     Similarly "Perl_newSVpvn_flags()" can be used to combine
     "Perl_newSVpv()" with "Perl_sv_2mortal()" or the equivalent
     "Perl_sv_newmortal()" with "Perl_sv_setpvn()"

     Two new macros "mPUSHs()" and "mXPUSHs()" are added, to make
     it easier to push mortal SVs onto the stack. They were then
     used to fix several bugs where values on the stack had not
     been mortalised.

     A "Perl_signbit()" function was added to test the sign of an
     "NV". It maps to the system one when available.

     "Perl_av_reify()", "Perl_lex_end()", "Perl_mod()",
     "Perl_op_clear()", "Perl_pop_return()", "Perl_qerror()",
     "Perl_setdefout()", "Perl_vivify_defelem()" and
     "Perl_yylex()" are now visible to extensions.  This was
     required to allow "Data::Alias" to work on Windows.

     "Perl_find_runcv()" is now visible to perl core extensions.
     This was required to allow "Sub::Current" to work on
     Windows.

     "ptr_table*" functions are now available in unthreaded perl.
     "Storable" takes advantage of this.

     There have been many small cleanups made to the internals.
     In particular, "Perl_sv_upgrade()" has been simplified
     considerably, with a straight-through code path that uses
     "memset()" and "memcpy()" to initialise the new body, rather
     than assignment via multiple temporary variables. It has
     also benefited from simplification and de-duplication of the
     arena management code.



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     A lot of small improvements in the code base were made due
     to reports from the Coverity static code analyzer.

     Corrected use and documentation of "Perl_gv_stashpv()",
     "Perl_gv_stashpvn()", "Perl_gv_stashsv()" functions (last
     parameter is a bitmask, not boolean).

     "PERL_SYS_INIT", "PERL_SYS_INIT3" and "PERL_SYS_TERM" macros
     have been changed into functions.

     "PERLSYS_TERM" no longer requires a context.
     "PerlIO_teardown()" is now called without a context, and
     debugging output in this function has been disabled because
     that required that an interpreter was present, an invalid
     assumption at termination time.

     All compile time options which affect binary compatibility
     have been grouped together into a global variable
     ("PL_bincompat_options").

     The values of "PERL_REVISION", "PERL_VERSION" and
     "PERL_SUBVERSION" are now baked into global variables (and
     hence into any shared perl library).  Additionally under
     "MULTIPLICITY", the perl executable now records the size of
     the interpreter structure (total, and for this version).
     Coupled with "PL_bincompat_options" this will allow 5.8.10
     (and later), when compiled with a shared perl library, to
     perform sanity checks in "main()" to verify that the shared
     library is indeed binary compatible.

     Symbolic references can now have embedded NULs. The new
     public function "Perl_get_cvn_flags()" can be used in
     extensions if you have to handle them.

  Macro cleanups
     The core code, and XS code in ext that is not dual-lived on
     CPAN, no longer uses the macros "PL_na", "NEWSV()",
     "Null()", "Nullav", "Nullcv", "Nullhv", "Nullhv" etc. Their
     use is discouraged in new code, particularly "PL_na", which
     is a small performance hit.

New Tests
     Many modules updated from CPAN incorporate new tests. Some
     core specific tests have been added:

     ext/DynaLoader/t/DynaLoader.t
         Tests for the "DynaLoader" module.

     t/comp/fold.t
         Tests for compile-time constant folding.

     t/io/pvbm.t



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         Tests incorporated from 5.10.0 which check that there is
         no unexpected interaction between the internal types
         "PVBM" and "PVGV".

     t/lib/proxy_constant_subs.t
         Tests for the new form of constant subroutines.

     t/op/attrhand.t
         Tests for "Attribute::Handlers".

     t/op/dbm.t
         Tests for "dbmopen".

     t/op/inccode-tie.t
         Calls all tests in t/op/inccode.t after first tying
         @INC.

     t/op/incfilter.t
         Tests for source filters returned from code references
         in @INC.

     t/op/kill0.t
         Tests for RT #30970.

     t/op/qrstack.t
         Tests for RT #41484.

     t/op/qr.t
         Tests for the "qr//" construct.

     t/op/regexp_qr_embed.t
         Tests for the "qr//" construct within another regexp.

     t/op/regexp_qr.t
         Tests for the "qr//" construct.

     t/op/rxcode.t
         Tests for RT #32840.

     t/op/studytied.t
         Tests for "study" on tied scalars.

     t/op/substT.t
         Tests for "subst" run under "-T" mode.

     t/op/symbolcache.t
         Tests for "undef" and "delete" on stash entries that are
         bound to subroutines or methods.

     t/op/upgrade.t
         Tests for "Perl_sv_upgrade()".




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     t/mro/package_aliases.t
         MRO tests for "isa" and package aliases.

     t/pod/twice.t
         Tests for calling "Pod::Parser" twice.

     t/run/cloexec.t
         Tests for inheriting file descriptors across "exec"
         (close-on-exec).

     t/uni/cache.t
         Tests for the UTF-8 caching code.

     t/uni/chr.t
         Test that strange encodings do not upset
         "Perl_pp_chr()".

     t/uni/greek.t
         Tests for RT #40641.

     t/uni/latin2.t
         Tests for RT #40641.

     t/uni/overload.t
         Tests for returning Unicode from overloaded values.

     t/uni/tie.t
         Tests for returning Unicode from tied variables.

Known Problems
     There are no known new bugs.

     However, programs that rely on bugs that have been fixed
     will have problems.  Also, many bug fixes present in 5.10.0
     can't be back-ported to the 5.8.x branch, because they
     require changes that are binary incompatible, or because the
     code changes are too large and hence too risky to
     incorporate.

     We have only limited volunteer labour, and the maintenance
     burden is getting increasingly complex. Hence this will be
     the last significant release of the 5.8.x series. Any future
     releases of 5.8.x will likely only be to deal with security
     issues, and platform build failures. Hence you should look
     to migrating to 5.10.x, if you have not started already.
     Alternatively, if business requirements constrain you to
     continue to use 5.8.x, you may wish to consider commercial
     support from firms such as ActiveState.

Platform Specific Notes
  Win32
     "readdir()", "cwd()", $^X and @INC now use the alternate



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     (short) filename if the long name is outside the current
     codepage (Jan Dubois).

     Updated Modules

     o   "Win32" upgraded to version 0.38. Now has a documented
         'WinVista' response from "GetOSName" and support for
         Vista's privilege elevation in "IsAdminUser".  Support
         for Unicode characters in path names. Improved cygwin
         and Win64 compatibility.

     o   "Win32API" updated to 0.1001_01

     o   "killpg()" support added to "MSWin32" (Jan Dubois).

     o   "File::Spec::Win32" upgraded to version 3.2701

  OS/2
     Updated Modules

     o   "OS2::Process" upgraded to 1.03

         Ilya Zakharevich has added and documented several
         "Window*" and "Clipbrd*" functions.

     o   "OS2::REXX::DLL", "OS2::REXX" updated to version 1.03

  VMS
     Updated Modules

     o   "DCLsym" upgraded to version 1.03

     o   "Stdio" upgraded to version 2.4

     o   "VMS::XSSymSet" upgraded to 1.1.

Obituary
     Nick Ing-Simmons, long time Perl hacker, author of the "Tk"
     and "Encode" modules, perlio.c in the core, and 5.003_02
     pumpking, died of a heart attack on 25th September 2006. He
     will be missed.

Acknowledgements
     Some of the work in this release was funded by a TPF grant.

     Steve Hay worked behind the scenes working out the causes of
     the differences between core modules, their CPAN releases,
     and previous core releases, and the best way to rectify
     them. He doesn't want to do it again. I know this feeling,
     and I'm very glad he did it this time, instead of me.





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     Paul Fenwick assembled a team of 18 volunteers, who broke
     the back of writing this document. In particular, Bradley
     Dean, Eddy Tan, and Vincent Pit provided half the team's
     contribution.

     Schwern verified the list of updated module versions,
     correcting quite a few errors that I (and everyone else) had
     missed, both wrongly stated module versions, and changed
     modules that had not been listed.

     The crack Berlin-based QA team of Andreas Koenig and Slaven
     Rezic tirelessly re-built snapshots, tested most everything
     CPAN against them, and then identified the changes
     responsible for any module regressions, ensuring that
     several show-stopper bugs were stomped before the first
     release candidate was cut.

     The other core committers contributed most of the changes,
     and applied most of the patches sent in by the hundreds of
     contributors listed in AUTHORS.

     And obviously, Larry Wall, without whom we wouldn't have
     Perl.

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 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/

     If the bug you are reporting has security implications,
     which make it inappropriate to send to a publicly archived
     mailing list, then please send it to
     perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed
     subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the
     core committers, who be able to help assess the impact of
     issues, figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the
     release of patches to mitigate or fix the problem across all
     platforms on which Perl is supported. Please only use this
     address for security issues in the Perl core, not for
     modules independently distributed on CPAN.





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ATTRIBUTES
     See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following
     attributes:

     +---------------+------------------+
     |ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE  |
     +---------------+------------------+
     |Availability   | runtime/perl-512 |
     +---------------+------------------+
     |Stability      | Uncommitted      |
     +---------------+------------------+
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.



NOTES
     This software was built from source available at
     https://java.net/projects/solaris-userland.  The original
     community source was downloaded from
     http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.12.5.tar.bz2

     Further information about this software can be found on the
     open source community website at http://www.perl.org/.

























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