source: trunk/essentials/dev-lang/perl/pod/perl584delta.pod@ 3280

=head1 NAME

perl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.8.3 release and
the 5.8.4 release.

=head1 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 C<\x> notation, rather than
octal. This might just confuse non-robust tools which parse the output of
modules such as Devel::Peek.

=head1 Core Enhancements

=head2 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.

=head2 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.

=head2 suidperl less insecure

Paul Szabo has analysed and patched C<suidperl> to remove existing known
insecurities. Currently there are no known holes in C<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 C<sperl5.8.>I<n> (C<sperl5.8.4> for this release). C<suidperl>
is installed as a hard link to C<perl>; both C<suidperl> and C<perl> will
invoke C<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 C<sudo> in preference to
C<suidperl>.

=head2 format

In addition to bug fixes, C<format>'s features have been enhanced. See
L<perlform>

=head1 Modules and Pragmata

The (mis)use of C</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.

=head2 Updated modules

=over 4

=item Attribute::Handlers

=item B

=item Benchmark

=item CGI