MirBSD manpage: perl571delta(1)


PERL571DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide  PERL571DELTA(1)

NAME

     perl571delta - what's new for perl v5.7.1

DESCRIPTION

     This document describes differences between the 5.7.0
     release and the 5.7.1 release.

     (To view the differences between the 5.6.0 release and the
     5.7.0 release, see perl570delta.)

Security Vulnerability Closed

     (This change was already made in 5.7.0 but bears repeating
     here.)

     A potential security vulnerability in the optional suidperl
     component of Perl was identified in August 2000.  suidperl
     is neither built nor installed by default.  As of April 2001
     the only known vulnerable platform is Linux, most likely all
     Linux distributions.  CERT and various vendors and distribu-
     tors have been alerted about the vulnerability. See
     http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/sperl-2000-08-05/sperl-2000-08-05.txt
     for more information.

     The problem was caused by Perl trying to report a suspected
     security exploit attempt using an external program,
     /bin/mail.  On Linux platforms the /bin/mail program had an
     undocumented feature which when combined with suidperl gave
     access to a root shell, resulting in a serious compromise
     instead of reporting the exploit attempt.  If you don't have
     /bin/mail, or if you have 'safe setuid scripts', or if suid-
     perl is not installed, you are safe.

     The exploit attempt reporting feature has been completely
     removed from all the Perl 5.7 releases (and will be gone
     also from the maintenance release 5.6.1), so that particular
     vulnerability isn't there anymore. However, further security
     vulnerabilities are, unfortunately, always possible.  The
     suidperl code is being reviewed and if deemed too risky to
     continue to be supported, it may be completely removed from
     future releases.  In any case, suidperl should only be used
     by security experts who know exactly what they are doing and
     why they are using suidperl instead of some other solution
     such as sudo ( see http://www.courtesan.com/sudo/ ).

Incompatible Changes

     +   Although "you shouldn't do that", it was possible to
         write code that depends on Perl's hashed key order
         (Data::Dumper does this).  The new algorithm
         "One-at-a-Time" produces a different hashed key order.
         More details are in "Performance Enhancements".

     +   The list of filenames from glob() (or <...>) is now by

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         default sorted alphabetically to be csh-compliant.
         (bsd_glob() does still sort platform natively, ASCII or
         EBCDIC, unless GLOB_ALPHASORT is specified.)

Core Enhancements

     AUTOLOAD Is Now Lvaluable

     AUTOLOAD is now lvaluable, meaning that you can add the
     :lvalue attribute to AUTOLOAD subroutines and you can assign
     to the AUTOLOAD return value.

     PerlIO is Now The Default

     +   IO is now by default done via PerlIO rather than
         system's "stdio". PerlIO allows "layers" to be "pushed"
         onto a file handle to alter the handle's behaviour.
         Layers can be specified at open time via 3-arg form of
         open:

            open($fh,'>:crlf :utf8', $path) || ...

         or on already opened handles via extended "binmode":

            binmode($fh,':encoding(iso-8859-7)');

         The built-in layers are: unix (low level read/write),
         stdio (as in previous Perls), perlio (re-implementation
         of stdio buffering in a portable manner), crlf (does
         CRLF <=> "\n" translation as on Win32, but available on
         any platform).  A mmap layer may be available if plat-
         form supports it (mostly UNIXes).

         Layers to be applied by default may be specified via the
         'open' pragma.

         See "Installation and Configuration Improvements" for
         the effects of PerlIO on your architecture name.

     +   File handles can be marked as accepting Perl's internal
         encoding of Unicode (UTF-8 or UTF-EBCDIC depending on
         platform) by a pseudo layer ":utf8" :

            open($fh,">:utf8","Uni.txt");

         Note for EBCDIC users: the pseudo layer ":utf8" is
         erroneously named for you since it's not UTF-8 what you
         will be getting but instead UTF-EBCDIC.  See perlun-
         icode, utf8, and
         http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr16/ for more
         information. In future releases this naming may change.

     +   File handles can translate character encodings from/to

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         Perl's internal Unicode form on read/write via the
         ":encoding()" layer.

     +   File handles can be opened to "in memory" files held in
         Perl scalars via:

            open($fh,'>', \$variable) || ...

     +   Anonymous temporary files are available without need to
         'use FileHandle' or other module via

            open($fh,"+>", undef) || ...

         That is a literal undef, not an undefined value.

     +   The list form of "open" is now implemented for pipes (at
         least on UNIX):

            open($fh,"-|", 'cat', '/etc/motd')

         creates a pipe, and runs the equivalent of exec('cat',
         '/etc/motd') in the child process.

     +   The following builtin functions are now overridable:
         chop(), chomp(), each(), keys(), pop(), push(), shift(),
         splice(), unshift().

     +   Formats now support zero-padded decimal fields.

     +   Perl now tries internally to use integer values in
         numeric conversions and basic arithmetics (+ - * /) if
         the arguments are integers, and tries also to keep the
         results stored internally as integers. This change leads
         into often slightly faster and always less lossy arith-
         metics. (Previously Perl always preferred floating point
         numbers in its math.)

     +   The printf() and sprintf() now support parameter reord-
         ering using the "%\d+\$" and "*\d+\$" syntaxes.  For
         example

             print "%2\$s %1\$s\n", "foo", "bar";

         will print "bar foo\n"; This feature helps in writing
         internationalised software.

     +   Unicode in general should be now much more usable.
         Unicode can be used in hash keys, Unicode in regular
         expressions should work now, Unicode in tr/// should
         work now (though tr/// seems to be a particularly tricky
         to get right, so you have been warned)

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     +   The Unicode Character Database coming with Perl has been
         upgraded to Unicode 3.1.  For more information, see
         http://www.unicode.org/ , and
         http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr27/

         For developers interested in enhancing Perl's Unicode
         capabilities: almost all the UCD files are included with
         the Perl distribution in the lib/unicode subdirectory.
         The most notable omission, for space considerations, is
         the Unihan database.

     +   The Unicode character classes \p{Blank} and
         \p{SpacePerl} have been added.  "Blank" is like C
         isblank(), that is, it contains only "horizontal whi-
         tespace" (the space character is, the newline isn't),
         and the "SpacePerl" is the Unicode equivalent of "\s"
         (\p{Space} isn't, since that includes the vertical tabu-
         lator character, whereas "\s" doesn't.)

     Signals Are Now Safe

     Perl used to be fragile in that signals arriving at inoppor-
     tune moments could corrupt Perl's internal state.

Modules and Pragmata

     New Modules

     +   B::Concise, by Stephen McCamant, is a new compiler back-
         end for walking the Perl syntax tree, printing concise
         info about ops. The output is highly customisable.

         See B::Concise for more information.

     +   Class::ISA, by Sean Burke, for reporting the search path
         for a class's ISA tree, has been added.

         See Class::ISA for more information.

     +   Cwd has now a split personality: if possible, an exten-
         sion is used, (this will hopefully be both faster and
         more secure and robust) but if not possible, the fami-
         liar Perl library implementation is used.

     +   Digest, a frontend module for calculating digests
         (checksums), from Gisle Aas, has been added.

         See Digest for more information.

     +   Digest::MD5 for calculating MD5 digests (checksums), by
         Gisle Aas, has been added.

             use Digest::MD5 'md5_hex';

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             $digest = md5_hex("Thirsty Camel");

             print $digest, "\n"; # 01d19d9d2045e005c3f1b80e8b164de1

         NOTE: the MD5 backward compatibility module is deli-
         berately not included since its use is discouraged.

         See Digest::MD5 for more information.

     +   Encode, by Nick Ing-Simmons, provides a mechanism to
         translate between different character encodings.  Sup-
         port for Unicode, ISO-8859-*, ASCII, CP*, KOI8-R, and
         three variants of EBCDIC are compiled in to the module.
         Several other encodings (like Japanese, Chinese, and
         MacIntosh encodings) are included and will be loaded at
         runtime.

         Any encoding supported by Encode module is also avail-
         able to the ":encoding()" layer if PerlIO is used.

         See Encode for more information.

     +   Filter::Simple is an easy-to-use frontend to
         Filter::Util::Call, from Damian Conway.

             # in MyFilter.pm:

             package MyFilter;

             use Filter::Simple sub {
                 while (my ($from, $to) = splice @_, 0, 2) {
                         s/$from/$to/g;
                 }
             };

             1;

             # in user's code:

             use MyFilter qr/red/ => 'green';

             print "red\n";   # this code is filtered, will print "green\n"
             print "bored\n"; # this code is filtered, will print "bogreen\n"

             no MyFilter;

             print "red\n";   # this code is not filtered, will print "red\n"

         See Filter::Simple for more information.

     +   Filter::Util::Call, by Paul Marquess, provides you with
         the framework to write Source Filters in Perl.  For most

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         uses the frontend Filter::Simple is to be preferred. See
         Filter::Util::Call for more information.

     +   Locale::Constants, Locale::Country, Locale::Currency,
         and Locale::Language, from Neil Bowers, have been added.
         They provide the codes for various locale standards,
         such as "fr" for France, "usd" for US Dollar, and "jp"
         for Japanese.

             use Locale::Country;

             $country = code2country('jp');               # $country gets 'Japan'
             $code    = country2code('Norway');           # $code gets 'no'

         See Locale::Constants, Locale::Country,
         Locale::Currency, and Locale::Language for more informa-
         tion.

     +   MIME::Base64, by Gisle Aas, allows you to encode data in
         base64.

             use MIME::Base64;

             $encoded = encode_base64('Aladdin:open sesame');
             $decoded = decode_base64($encoded);

             print $encoded, "\n"; # "QWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuIHNlc2FtZQ=="

         See MIME::Base64 for more information.

     +   MIME::QuotedPrint, by Gisle Aas, allows you to encode
         data in quoted-printable encoding.

             use MIME::QuotedPrint;

             $encoded = encode_qp("Smiley in Unicode: \x{263a}");
             $decoded = decode_qp($encoded);

             print $encoded, "\n"; # "Smiley in Unicode: =263A"

         MIME::QuotedPrint has been enhanced to provide the basic
         methods necessary to use it with PerlIO::Via as in :

             use MIME::QuotedPrint;
             open($fh,">Via(MIME::QuotedPrint)",$path)

         See MIME::QuotedPrint for more information.

     +   PerlIO::Scalar, by Nick Ing-Simmons, provides the imple-
         mentation of IO to "in memory" Perl scalars as discussed
         above.  It also serves as an example of a loadable
         layer.  Other future possibilities include PerlIO::Array

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         and PerlIO::Code.  See PerlIO::Scalar for more informa-
         tion.

     +   PerlIO::Via, by Nick Ing-Simmons, acts as a PerlIO layer
         and wraps PerlIO layer functionality provided by a class
         (typically implemented in perl code).

             use MIME::QuotedPrint;
             open($fh,">Via(MIME::QuotedPrint)",$path)

         This will automatically convert everything output to $fh
         to Quoted-Printable.  See PerlIO::Via for more informa-
         tion.

     +   Pod::Text::Overstrike, by Joe Smith, has been added. It
         converts POD data to formatted overstrike text. See
         Pod::Text::Overstrike for more information.

     +   Switch from Damian Conway has been added.  Just by say-
         ing

             use Switch;

         you have "switch" and "case" available in Perl.

             use Switch;

             switch ($val) {

                         case 1          { print "number 1" }
                         case "a"        { print "string a" }
                         case [1..10,42] { print "number in list" }
                         case (@array)   { print "number in list" }
                         case /\w+/      { print "pattern" }
                         case qr/\w+/    { print "pattern" }
                         case (%hash)    { print "entry in hash" }
                         case (\%hash)   { print "entry in hash" }
                         case (\&sub)    { print "arg to subroutine" }
                         else            { print "previous case not true" }
             }

         See Switch for more information.

     +   Text::Balanced from Damian Conway has been added, for
         extracting delimited text sequences from strings.

             use Text::Balanced 'extract_delimited';

             ($a, $b) = extract_delimited("'never say never', he never said", "'", '');

         $a will be "'never say never'", $b will be ', he never
         said'.

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         In addition to extract_delimited() there are also
         extract_bracketed(), extract_quotelike(),
         extract_codeblock(), extract_variable(),
         extract_tagged(), extract_multiple(),
         gen_delimited_pat(), and gen_extract_tagged().  With
         these you can implement rather advanced parsing algo-
         rithms.  See Text::Balanced for more information.

     +   Tie::RefHash::Nestable, by Edward Avis, allows storing
         hash references (unlike the standard Tie::RefHash)  The
         module is contained within Tie::RefHash.

     +   XS::Typemap, by Tim Jenness, is a test extension that
         exercises XS typemaps.  Nothing gets installed but for
         extension writers the code is worth studying.

     Updated And Improved Modules and Pragmata

     +   B::Deparse should be now more robust.  It still far from
         providing a full round trip for any random piece of Perl
         code, though, and is under active development: expect
         more robustness in 5.7.2.

     +   Class::Struct can now define the classes in compile
         time.

     +   Math::BigFloat has undergone much fixing, and in addi-
         tion the fmod() function now supports modulus opera-
         tions.

         ( The fixed Math::BigFloat module is also available in
         CPAN for those who can't upgrade their Perl:
         http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/J/JP/JPEACOCK/ )

     +   Devel::Peek now has an interface for the Perl memory
         statistics (this works only if you are using perl's mal-
         loc, and if you have compiled with debugging).

     +   IO::Socket has now atmark() method, which returns true
         if the socket is positioned at the out-of-band mark.
         The method is also exportable as a sockatmark() func-
         tion.

     +   IO::Socket::INET has support for ReusePort option (if
         your platform supports it).  The Reuse option now has an
         alias, ReuseAddr.  For clarity you may want to prefer
         ReuseAddr.

     +   Net::Ping has been enhanced.  There is now "external"
         protocol which uses Net::Ping::External module which
         runs external ping(1) and parses the output.  An alpha
         version of Net::Ping::External is available in CPAN and

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         in 5.7.2 the Net::Ping::External may be integrated to
         Perl.

     +   The "open" pragma allows layers other than ":raw" and
         ":crlf" when using PerlIO.

     +   POSIX::sigaction() is now much more flexible and robust.
         You can now install coderef handlers, 'DEFAULT', and
         'IGNORE' handlers, installing new handlers was not
         atomic.

     +   The Test module has been significantly enhanced.  Its
         use is greatly recommended for module writers.

     +   The utf8:: name space (as in the pragma) provides vari-
         ous Perl-callable functions to provide low level access
         to Perl's internal Unicode representation.  At the
         moment only length() has been implemented.

     The following modules have been upgraded from the versions
     at CPAN: CPAN, CGI, DB_File, File::Temp, Getopt::Long,
     Pod::Man, Pod::Text, Storable, Text-Tabs+Wrap.

Performance Enhancements

     +   Hashes now use Bob Jenkins "One-at-a-Time" hashing key
         algorithm ( http://burtleburtle.net/bob/hash/doobs.html
         ).  This algorithm is reasonably fast while producing a
         much better spread of values than the old hashing algo-
         rithm (originally by Chris Torek, later tweaked by Ilya
         Zakharevich).  Hash values output from the algorithm on
         a hash of all 3-char printable ASCII keys comes much
         closer to passing the DIEHARD random number generation
         tests.  According to perlbench, this change has not
         affected the overall speed of Perl.

     +   unshift() should now be noticeably faster.

Utility Changes

     +   h2xs now produces template README.

     +   s2p has been completely rewritten in Perl.  (It is in
         fact a full implementation of sed in Perl.)

     +   xsubpp now supports OUT keyword.

New Documentation

     perlclib

     Internal replacements for standard C library functions.
     (Interesting only for extension writers and Perl core hack-
     ers.)

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     perliol

     Internals of PerlIO with layers.

     README.aix

     Documentation on compiling Perl on AIX has been added.  AIX
     has several different C compilers and getting the right
     patch level is essential.  On install README.aix will be
     installed as perlaix.

     README.bs2000

     Documentation on compiling Perl on the POSIX-BC platform (an
     EBCDIC mainframe environment) has been added.

     This was formerly known as README.posix-bc but the name was
     considered to be too confusing (it has nothing to do with
     the POSIX module or the POSIX standard).  On install
     README.bs2000 will be installed as perlbs2000.

     README.macos

     In perl 5.7.1 (and in the 5.6.1) the MacPerl sources have
     been synchronised with the standard Perl sources.  To com-
     pile MacPerl some additional steps are required, and this
     file documents those steps.  On install README.macos will be
     installed as perlmacos.

     README.mpeix

     The README.mpeix has been podified, which means that this
     information about compiling and using Perl on the MPE/iX
     miniframe platform will be installed as perlmpeix.

     README.solaris

     README.solaris has been created and Solaris wisdom from
     elsewhere in the Perl documentation has been collected
     there.  On install README.solaris will be installed as perl-
     solaris.

     README.vos

     The README.vos has been podified, which means that this
     information about compiling and using Perl on the Stratus
     VOS miniframe platform will be installed as perlvos.

     Porting/repository.pod

     Documentation on how to use the Perl source repository has
     been added.

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Installation and Configuration Improvements

     +   Because PerlIO is now the default on most platforms,
         "-perlio" doesn't get appended to the $Config{archname}
         (also known as $^O) anymore. Instead, if you explicitly
         choose not to use perlio (Configure command line option
         -Uuseperlio), you will get "-stdio" appended.

     +   Another change related to the architecture name is that
         "-64all" (-Duse64bitall, or "maximally 64-bit") is
         appended only if your pointers are 64 bits wide.  (To be
         exact, the use64bitall is ignored.)

     +   APPLLIB_EXP, a less-know configuration-time definition,
         has been documented.  It can be used to prepend site-
         specific directories to Perl's default search path
         (@INC), see INSTALL for information.

     +   Building Berkeley DB3 for compatibility modes for DB,
         NDBM, and ODBM has been documented in INSTALL.

     +   If you are on IRIX or Tru64 platforms, new
         profiling/debugging options have been added, see
         perlhack for more information about pixie and Third
         Degree.

     New Or Improved Platforms

     For the list of platforms known to support Perl, see "Sup-
     ported Platforms" in perlport.

     +   AIX dynamic loading should be now better supported.

     +   After a long pause, AmigaOS has been verified to be
         happy with Perl.

     +   EBCDIC platforms (z/OS, also known as OS/390, POSIX-BC,
         and VM/ESA) have been regained.  Many test suite tests
         still fail and the co-existence of Unicode and EBCDIC
         isn't quite settled, but the situation is much better
         than with Perl 5.6.  See perlos390, perlbs2000 (for
         POSIX-BC), and perlvmesa for more information.

     +   Building perl with -Duseithreads or -Duse5005threads now
         works under HP-UX 10.20 (previously it only worked under
         10.30 or later). You will need a thread library package
         installed. See README.hpux.

     +   Mac OS Classic (MacPerl has of course been available
         since perl 5.004 but now the source code bases of stan-
         dard Perl and MacPerl have been synchronised)

     +   NCR MP-RAS is now supported.

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     +   NonStop-UX is now supported.

     +   Amdahl UTS is now supported.

     +   z/OS (formerly known as OS/390, formerly known as MVS
         OE) has now support for dynamic loading.  This is not
         selected by default, however, you must specify -Dusedl
         in the arguments of Configure.

     Generic Improvements

     +   Configure no longer includes the DBM libraries (dbm,
         gdbm, db, ndbm) when building the Perl binary.  The only
         exception to this is SunOS 4.x, which needs them.

     +   Some new Configure symbols, useful for extension writ-
         ers:

         d_cmsghdr
                 For struct cmsghdr.

         d_fcntl_can_lock
                 Whether fcntl() can be used for file locking.

         d_fsync
         d_getitimer
         d_getpagsz
                 For getpagesize(), though you should prefer
                 POSIX::sysconf(_SC_PAGE_SIZE))

         d_msghdr_s
                 For struct msghdr.

         need_va_copy
                 Whether one needs to use Perl_va_copy() to copy
                 varargs.

         d_readv
         d_recvmsg
         d_sendmsg
         sig_size
                 The number of elements in an array needed to
                 hold all the available signals.

         d_sockatmark
         d_strtoq
         d_u32align
                 Whether one needs to access character data
                 aligned by U32 sized pointers.

         d_ualarm
         d_usleep

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     +   Removed Configure symbols: the PDP-11 memory model set-
         tings: huge, large, medium, models.

     +   SOCKS support is now much more robust.

     +   If your filesystem supports symbolic links you can build
         Perl outside of the source directory by

                 mkdir perl/build/directory
                 cd perl/build/directory
                 sh /path/to/perl/source/Configure -Dmksymlinks ...

         This will create in perl/build/directory a tree of sym-
         bolic links pointing to files in /path/to/perl/source.
         The original files are left unaffected.  After Configure
         has finished you can just say

                 make all test

         and Perl will be built and tested, all in
         perl/build/directory.

Selected Bug Fixes

     Numerous memory leaks and uninitialized memory accesses have
     been hunted down. Most importantly anonymous subs used to
     leak quite a bit.

     +   chop(@list) in list context returned the characters
         chopped in reverse order.  This has been reversed to be
         in the right order.

     +   The order of DESTROYs has been made more predictable.

     +   mkdir() now ignores trailing slashes in the directory
         name, as mandated by POSIX.

     +   Attributes (like :shared) didn't work with our().

     +   The PERL5OPT environment variable (for passing command
         line arguments to Perl) didn't work for more than a sin-
         gle group of options.

     +   The tainting behaviour of sprintf() has been rational-
         ized.  It does not taint the result of floating point
         formats anymore, making the behaviour consistent with
         that of string interpolation.

     +   All but the first argument of the IO syswrite() method
         are now optional.

     +   Tie::ARRAY SPLICE method was broken.

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     +   vec() now tries to work with characters <= 255 when pos-
         sible, but it leaves higher character values in place.
         In that case, if vec() was used to modify the string, it
         is no longer considered to be utf8-encoded.

     Platform Specific Changes and Fixes

     +   Linux previously had problems related to sockaddrlen
         when using accept(), revcfrom() (in Perl: recv()), get-
         peername(), and getsockname().

     +   Previously DYNIX/ptx had problems in its Configure probe
         for non-blocking I/O.

     +   Windows

         +       Borland C++ v5.5 is now a supported compiler
                 that can build Perl. However, the generated
                 binaries continue to be incompatible with those
                 generated by the other supported compilers (GCC
                 and Visual C++).

         +       Win32::GetCwd() correctly returns C:\ instead of
                 C: when at the drive root. Other bugs in chdir()
                 and Cwd::cwd() have also been fixed.

         +       Duping socket handles with open(F, ">&MYSOCK")
                 now works under Windows 9x.

         +       HTML files will be installed in c:\perl\html
                 instead of c:\perl\lib\pod\html

         +       The makefiles now provide a single switch to
                 bulk-enable all the features enabled in Active-
                 State ActivePerl (a popular binary distribu-
                 tion).

New or Changed Diagnostics

     Two new debugging options have been added: if you have com-
     piled your Perl with debugging, you can use the -DT and -DR
     options to trace tokenising and to add reference counts to
     displaying variables, respectively.

     +   If an attempt to use a (non-blessed) reference as an
         array index is made, a warning is given.

     +   "push @a;" and "unshift @a;" (with no values to push or
         unshift) now give a warning.  This may be a problem for
         generated and evaled code.

Changed Internals

     +   Some new APIs: ptr_table_clear(), ptr_table_free(),

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         sv_setref_uv(). For the full list of the available APIs
         see perlapi.

     +   dTHR and djSP have been obsoleted; the former removed
         (because it's a no-op) and the latter replaced with dSP.

     +   Perl now uses system malloc instead of Perl malloc on
         all 64-bit platforms, and even in some not-always-64-bit
         platforms like AIX, IRIX, and Solaris.  This change
         breaks backward compatibility but Perl's malloc has
         problems with large address spaces and also the speed of
         vendors' malloc is generally better in large address
         space machines (Perl's malloc is mostly tuned for
         space).

New Tests

     Many new tests have been added.  The most notable is prob-
     ably the lib/1_compile: it is very notable because running
     it takes quite a long time -- it test compiles all the Perl
     modules in the distribution. Please be patient.

Known Problems

     Note that unlike other sections in this document (which
     describe changes since 5.7.0) this section is cumulative
     containing known problems for all the 5.7 releases.

     AIX vac 5.0.0.0 May Produce Buggy Code For Perl

     The AIX C compiler vac version 5.0.0.0 may produce buggy
     code, resulting in few random tests failing, but when the
     failing tests are run by hand, they succeed.  We suggest
     upgrading to at least vac version 5.0.1.0, that has been
     known to compile Perl correctly. "lslpp -L|grep vac.C" will
     tell you the vac version.

     lib/ftmp-security tests warn 'system possibly insecure'

     Don't panic.  Read INSTALL 'make test' section instead.

     lib/io_multihomed Fails In LP64-Configured HP-UX

     The lib/io_multihomed test may hang in HP-UX if Perl has
     been configured to be 64-bit. Because other 64-bit platforms
     do not hang in this test, HP-UX is suspect. All other tests
     pass in 64-bit HP-UX. The test attempts to create and con-
     nect to "multihomed" sockets (sockets which have multiple IP
     addresses).

     Test lib/posix Subtest 9 Fails In LP64-Configured HP-UX

     If perl is configured with -Duse64bitall, the successful
     result of the subtest 10 of lib/posix may arrive before the

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     successful result of the subtest 9, which confuses the test
     harness so much that it thinks the subtest 9 failed.

     lib/b test 19

     The test fails on various platforms (PA64 and IA64 are
     known), but the exact cause is still being investigated.

     Linux With Sfio Fails op/misc Test 48

     No known fix.

     sigaction test 13 in VMS

     The test is known to fail; whether it's because of VMS of
     because of faulty test is not known.

     sprintf tests 129 and 130

     The op/sprintf tests 129 and 130 are known to fail on some
     platforms. Examples include any platform using sfio, and
     Compaq/Tandem's NonStop-UX. The failing platforms do not
     comply with the ANSI C Standard, line 19ff on page 134 of
     ANSI X3.159 1989 to be exact.  (They produce something else
     than "1" and "-1" when formatting 0.6 and -0.6 using the
     printf format "%.0f", most often they produce "0" and "-0".)

     Failure of Thread tests

     The subtests 19 and 20 of lib/thr5005.t test are known to
     fail due to fundamental problems in the 5.005 threading
     implementation. These are not new failures--Perl 5.005_0x
     has the same bugs, but didn't have these tests. (Note that
     support for 5.005-style threading remains experimental.)

     Localising a Tied Variable Leaks Memory

         use Tie::Hash;
         tie my %tie_hash => 'Tie::StdHash';

         ...

         local($tie_hash{Foo}) = 1; # leaks

     Code like the above is known to leak memory every time the
     local() is executed.

     Self-tying of Arrays and Hashes Is Forbidden

     Self-tying of arrays and hashes is broken in rather deep and
     hard-to-fix ways.  As a stop-gap measure to avoid people
     from getting frustrated at the mysterious results (core

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     dumps, most often) it is for now forbidden (you will get a
     fatal error even from an attempt).

     Building Extensions Can Fail Because Of Largefiles

     Some extensions like mod_perl are known to have issues with
     `largefiles', a change brought by Perl 5.6.0 in which file
     offsets default to 64 bits wide, where supported.  Modules
     may fail to compile at all or compile and work incorrectly.
     Currently there is no good solution for the problem, but
     Configure now provides appropriate non-largefile ccflags,
     ldflags, libswanted, and libs in the %Config hash (e.g.,
     $Config{ccflags_nolargefiles}) so the extensions that are
     having problems can try configuring themselves without the
     largefileness.  This is admittedly not a clean solution, and
     the solution may not even work at all.  One potential
     failure is whether one can (or, if one can, whether it's a
     good idea) link together at all binaries with different
     ideas about file offsets, all this is platform-dependent.

     The Compiler Suite Is Still Experimental

     The compiler suite is slowly getting better but is nowhere
     near working order yet.

Reporting Bugs

     If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the
     articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc news-
     group and the perl bug database at http://bugs.perl.org/
     There may also be information at http://www.perl.com/perl/ ,
     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.

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.

HISTORY

     Written by Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi>, with many contri-
     butions from The Perl Porters and Perl Users submitting
     feedback and patches.

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     Send omissions or corrections to <perlbug@perl.org>.

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