source: trunk/essentials/dev-lang/perl/Changes5.003@ 3187

Last change on this file since 3187 was 3181, checked in by bird, 19 years ago

perl 5.8.8

File size: 4.1 KB
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1-------------
2Version 5.003
3-------------
4
5 ***> IMPORTANT NOTICE: <***
6The main reason for this release was to fix a security bug affecting
7suidperl on some systems. If you build suidperl on your system, it
8is strongly recommended that you replace any existing copies with
9version 5.003 or later immediately.
10
11The changes in 5.003 have been held to a minimum, in the hope that this
12will simplify installation and testing at sites which may be affected
13by the security hole in suidperl. In brief, 5.003 does the following:
14
15- Plugs security hole in suidperl mechanism on affected systems
16
17- MakeMaker was also updated to version 5.34, and extension Makefile.PLs
18 were modified to match it.
19
20- The following hints files were updated: bsdos.sh, hpux.sh, linux.sh,
21 machten.sh, solaris_2.sh
22
23- A fix was added to installperl to insure that file permissions were
24 set correctly for the installed C header files.
25
26- t/op/stat.t was modified to work around MachTen's belief that /dev/null
27 is a terminal device.
28
29- Incorporation of Perl version information into the VMS' version of
30 config.h was changed to make it compatible with the older VAXC.
31
32- Minor fixes were made to VMS-specific C code, and the routine
33 VMS::Filespec::rmsexpand was added.
34
35----------------
36Version 5.002_01
37----------------
38
39- The EMBED namespace changes are now used by default, in order to better
40 segregate Perl's C global symbols from those belonging to embedding
41 applications or to libraries. This makes it necessary to rebuild dynamic
42 extensions built under previous versions of Perl without the EMBED option.
43 The default use of EMBED can be overridden by placing -DNO_EMBED on the
44 cc command line.
45
46 The EMBED change is the beginning of a general cleanup of C global
47 symbols used by Perl, so binary compatibility with previously
48 compiled dynamic extensions may be broken again in the next few
49 releases.
50
51- Several bugs in the core were fixed, including the following:
52 - made sure FILE * for -e temp file was closed only once
53 - improved form of single-statement macro definitions to keep
54 as many ccs as possible happy
55 - fixed file tests to insure that signed values were used when
56 computing differences between times.
57 - fixed toke.c so implicit loop isn't doubled when perl is
58 invoked with both the -p and -n switches
59
60- The new SUBVERSION number has been included in the default value for
61 architecture-specific library directories, so development and
62 production architecture-dependent libraries can coexist.
63
64- Two new magic variables, $^E and $^O, have been added. $^E contains the
65 OS-specific equivalent of $!. $^O contains the name of the operating
66 system, in order to make it easily available to Perl code whose behavior
67 differs according to its environment. The standard library files have
68 been converted to use $^O in preference to $Config{'osname'}.
69
70- A mechanism was added to allow listing of locally applied patches
71 in the output of perl -v.
72
73- Miscellaneous minor corrections and updates were made to the documentation.
74