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- ActivePerl 5.8 Change Log
- For the latest information on ActivePerl, please see:
-
- http://www.ActiveState.com/ActivePerl/
-
- Build 810 Monday, Jun 7, 2004
- Build 810 is based on Perl 5.8.4.
-
- *Bug Fixes and Changes*
-
- * Perl 5.8.4 has been incorporated. See perl584delta for a list of
- changes.
-
- * Many bundled modules have been updated to their latest versions:
-
- Archive-Tar-1.08
- Compress-Zlib-1.33
- Data-Dump-1.03
- Digest-1.08
- Digest-MD5-2.33
- Digest-SHA1-2.10
- File-CounterFile-1.04
- Font-AFM-1.19
- HTML-Parser-3.36
- MD5-2.03
- MIME-Base64-3.01
- Tk-804.027
- URI-1.30
- XML-Simple-2.12
- XML-XSLT-0.48 (only for HP-UX))
- libnet-1.18
- libwww-perl-5.79
- perl-ldap-0.31 (only for HP-UX))
-
- Build 809 Monday, Feb 2, 2004
- Build 809 is based on Perl 5.8.3.
-
- *Bug Fixes and Changes*
-
- * Perl 5.8.3 has been incorporated. See perl583delta for a list of
- changes.
-
- * The Win32 module now includes the Win32::IsAdminUser() function
- that checks if the current interpreter runs with Administrator
- privileges.
-
- * The access violations of detached threads on thread exit have
- been fixed.
-
- * Time::HiRes now provides high resolution on Windows too.
-
- Build 808 Thursday, Dec 6, 2003
- Build 808 is based on Perl 5.8.2.
-
- *Changes*
-
- * Perl 5.8.2 has been incorporated. See perl582delta for a list of
- changes.
-
- ActivePerl build 808 is still being compiled with the
- "-DNO_HASH_SEED" option to maintain binary compatibility with
- earlier releases. Perl 5.8.2 implements a new rehashing scheme
- that will kick in dynamically based on the actual data being
- stored in a hash. This new scheme is backwards compatible and is
- enabled in ActivePerl build 808.
-
- * The following modules are bundled with ActivePerl for HP-UX and
- have been updated to their latest versions:
-
- Convert-ASN1-0.18
- XML-DOM-1.43
- XML-XPath-1.13
- XML-XSLT-0.45
- perl-ldap-0.30
-
- Build 807 Thursday, Nov 6, 2003
- Build 807 is based on Perl 5.8.1. This is the first release of
- ActivePerl based on this new maintenance release of Perl. This release
- is meant for use in production systems. However, owing to the sheer
- volume of changes between Perl 5.8.0 and 5.8.1 that have been
- incorporated, please be sure to test it thoroughly in a non-critical
- environment before you upgrade your production systems.
-
- Please check perl581delta for a list of the major changes in Perl. Only
- additional changes specific to ActivePerl are mentioned here.
-
- *Bug Fixes and Changes*
-
- * Perl 5.8.1 has been incorporated. See perl581delta for a list of
- changes.
-
- Important note: The new *Hash Randomisation* feature has been
- disabled in ActivePerl because it is not compatible with Perl
- 5.8.0. If we enabled this feature then some modules compiled
- with 5.8.0 would not work correctly with 5.8.1 and most modules
- compiled with 5.8.1 would not work at all with Perl 5.8.0. This
- would require maintaining separate PPM module repositories for
- 5.8.0 and 5.8.1.
-
- To enable the *Hash Randomisation* feature you must recompile
- ActivePerl from source and remove the "-DNO_HASH_SEED"
- definition from the C compiler options. In that case you must
- compile all CPAN modules yourself too because the PPM repository
- binaries will not be compatible.
-
- * Windows 2003 Server is now officially supported. The installer
- adds entries to the IIS6 "Web Services Extensions" list for both
- "Perl CGI" and "Perl ISAPI". Both are set to "Prohibited" by
- default and must be explicitly changed to "Allow" in the IIS
- Manager.
-
- Win32::GetOSName() detects the release version of Windows 2003
- correctly.
-
- * ActiveState::Rx module has been included. This module is
- necessary to use the Rx Toolkit in ActiveState Visual Perl. You
- must upgrade Visual Perl to version 1.8.1 to use the Rx Toolkit
- with Perl 5.8.
-
- * Many bundled modules have been updated to their latest versions:
-
- Archive-Tar-1.07
- Compress-Zlib-1.22
- Data-Dump-1.01
- Digest-MD2-2.03
- Digest-MD5-2.30
- Digest-SHA1-2.06
- File-CounterFile-1.01
- HTML-Parser-3.34
- HTML-Tree-3.18
- URI-1.27
- XML-Parser-2.34
- XML-Simple-2.09
- libwin32-0.21
- libwww-perl-5.75
-
- In addition, IO::Zlib version 1.01 is now included with
- ActivePerl.
-
- *PPM*
-
- * The *upgrade* command has been fixed.
-
- * It is now possible to install from a file URL while not being
- connected to the internet.
-
- * PPM now works on Windows even when the Term::InKey module is
- installed.
-
- *Perl for ISAPI*
-
- * Perl for ISAPI no longer uses line buffering for STDOUT. This is
- especially important for running under IIS6 which bypasses
- TCP/IP nagling and directly sends every packet individually.
-
- * Perl for ISAPI used to close all open file handles before
- shutting down the Perl interpreter. The intention was to prevent
- file handle leaks from buggy Perl scripts while running inside
- the IIS process. Unfortunately Perl may still execute END blocks
- or call DESTROY methods during final destruction and some file
- handles may get closed twice in this scenario.
-
- This creates a race condition: the file handle may already have
- been re-opened by a different thread before the second close
- happens. Perl then closes a file handle it doesn't own anymore.
- This may cause a different page request to fail.
-
- To avoid this race condition Perl for ISAPI will no longer try
- to automatically close open file handles. Therefore it is
- possible that broken Perl applications will now start leaking
- file handles if they don't close them correctly themselves.
-
- Build 806 Monday, March 31, 2003
- *Bug Fixes and Changes*
-
- * Several bug fixes and other improvements have been merged from
- the Perl development track. In particular, many of these fixes
- address problems in the PerlIO implementation. See the
- ActivePerl source code diff for the complete list of included
- changes.
-
- * Other minor bug fixes and documentation updates.
-
- *PPM*
-
- PPM has been upgraded to version 3.1. It fixes most of the known
- problems, including:
-
- * PPM 3.1 now provides all the functionality of PPM 2.0 and 3.0.
- PPM 2.0 is therefore no longer included in ActivePerl 5.8.
-
- * PPM now works correctly through a proxy server requiring basic
- authentication. Previous versions of PPM 3.0 only supported
- proxy servers that did not require authentication.
-
- * PPM is now more robust in handling user-defined repository URLs.
- For instance, URLs with a trailing slash no longer result in
- fatal errors.
-
- * Support for ASPN Perl profiles has been much improved. However,
- at the time of this writing, the ActivePerl 5.8 repositories do
- not yet support profiles. This is expected to become available
- shortly.
-
- * In previous versions of PPM 3, incorrect search results from the
- repository (such as package names that do not have corresponding
- PPD files) could crash the PPM3 client. PPM now generates
- meaningful error messages under these circumstances.
-
- Build 805 Thursday, Feb 6, 2003
- *Bug Fixes and Changes*
-
- * Several bug fixes and other improvements have been merged from
- the Perl development track. In particular, many of these fixes
- address weaknesses in Unicode support. See the ActivePerl source
- code diff for the complete list of included changes.
-
- * Bugs in the Perl 5.8 integration of Perl for ISAPI and
- PerlScript that resulted in failure to flush output correctly at
- the termination of the script have been fixed.
-
- * On Windows, system() and backticks could return invalid status
- when running under environments where the process has to handle
- Windows messages. PerlScript and Perl for ISAPI fall under this
- category. The problem has been corrected.
-
- * On Windows, PerlScript and Perl for ISAPI were affected by a
- reentrancy problem, which meant that recursive invocation of
- these two engines could fail. This problem has been corrected.
-
- * Tk and libwww-perl has been updated to their latest versions.
-
- * Win32::Shortcut no longer calls CoUninitialize() within an END
- block. This avoids random coredumps from this module when its
- DESTROY methods happen to get called after the END block
- executes.
-
- * PPM v2 and v3 can now optionally generate HTML documentation
- when installing packages if POD documentation is found in the
- package. This is controlled by the rebuildhtml option in PPM v2
- and the rebuild-html option in PPM v3.
-
- * Other minor bug fixes and documentation updates.
-
- Build 804 Friday, Nov 29, 2002
- *What's new in the 800 Series*
-
- * This build corresponds to the Perl 5.8.0 source code release.
-
- * The 800 series builds of ActivePerl are not binary compatible
- with builds in the 500 or 600 series. Any extensions built using
- binaries from the ActivePerl 500 or 600 series will need to be
- recompiled. Note especially that this applies to PPM packages
- that may have been built for 500 or 600 series builds.
-
- * Significant changes that have occurred in the 5.8.0 release are
- documented in perl58delta.
-
- * Support has been enabled for large file access on all platforms,
- meaning that file manipulation facilities within perl can cope
- with files larger than 2GB or 4GB.
-
- * Many new modules are included as a standard part of perl 5.8.0.
- See "Modules and Pragmata" in perl58delta for a detailed list.
- In addition, the Data::Dump module is now included with
- ActivePerl. Many other modules have been updated to their latest
- versions.
-
- * PPM v3 is now included as the default "ppm" executable. PPM v2
- continues to be available, and can be executed as "ppm2".
-
-