- ActivePerl Change Log
- Build 631 Monday, December 31, 2001
- Build 630 Wednesday, October 30, 2001
- Build 629 Thursday, August 23, 2001
- Build 628 Thursday, July 5, 2001
- Build 626 Thursday, May 1, 2001
- Build 623 Sunday, December 12, 2000
- Build 622 Sunday, November 5, 2000
- Build 620 Sunday, October 29, 2000
- Build 618 Tuesday, September 12, 2000
- Build 617 Thursday, August 31, 2000
- Build 616 Friday, July 14, 2000
- Build 615 Thursday, June 29, 2000
- Build 613 Thursday, March 23, 2000
- Build 612 Wednesday, March 22, 2000
- Build 611 Wednesday, March 15, 2000
- Build 609 Wednesday, March 1, 2000
- Build 607 Friday, February 11, 2000
- Build 606 Friday, February 4, 2000
- Build 604 Friday, November 26, 1999
- Build 603 Tuesday, November 23, 1999
- Build 602 Thursday, August 5, 1999
- Build 601 Tuesday, July 13, 1999
- What's new in the 600 Series
For the latest information on ActivePerl, please see:
http://www.ActiveState.com/ActivePerl/
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
ActivePerl 5.6.1.628 introduced a memory leak in
eval "..."
expressions
that create anonymous subroutines. This has been fixed.
-
On Windows, the behavior of
system(@list)
has been further rationalized to
improve compatibility with the behavior before 5.6.1.630. Automatic quoting of
arguments with whitespace is now skipped if the argument already contains
double quotes anywhere within it. Previously, the double quotes needed
to be at both ends in order for further quoting to be skipped.
-
Bugs in command.com on Windows 9x/Me prevented the
system()
enhancements
in ActivePerl 5.6.1.630 from working in some situations. These enhancements
are now disabled under Windows 9x/Me.
-
Perl for ISAPI and PerlScript had a bug in ActivePerl 5.6.1.630 that
caused
system()
and backticks to leak handles, resulting in failure of
these functions after a certain number of invocations. This has been
corrected.
-
ActivePerl 5.6.1.629 and later had a problem in Perl for ISAPI that
caused %ENV modifications done by the script to affect the real
environment, resulting in incompatible behavior of scripts that assumed
the older behavior. The behavior before 5.6.1.629 has been reinstated.
-
On Windows, the internal memory allocator used by Perl could fail after
around 1 GB of allocations even though more memory may be available on
the system. Allocating up to and beyond 2GB is now possible if the
system has memory available and allows a single process to allocate
that amount of memory. Note that most Windows systems running on
x86 have a 2GB limit on allocations by a single process.
-
Non-blocking
waitpid()
on any process (a.k.a. waitpid(-1, WNOHANG)) is now
supported on Windows.
-
Due to popular demand, the following modules are now included by default:
Storable, Tk, and XML-Simple.
-
PPM v3 beta 3 is included. A number of bugs in beta 2 have been fixed.
Installing from URLs (http, ftp, and file) and installing through a HTTP
proxy server are now supported.
-
Compress-Zlib and MIME-Base64 have been updated to their latest versions.
-
Due to popular demand, HTML documentation has been reintroduced into the
default installation for Windows.
-
Various other minor bugs have been fixed. See the ActivePerl bug database
at http://bugs.ActiveState.com/ for more information.
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
PPM v3 beta 2 is included. This version of PPM is a complete rewrite,
and comes with many new features and improvements, including support
for managing installation profiles through the ASPN web site.
-
Many of the standard extensions supplied with Perl have been audited
for the use of C ``static'' variables and fixed to avoid such uses, making
these extensions safe to use in multi-threaded environments such as
PerlEx and PerlMx Enterprise. The list includes B, DynaLoader,
File::Glob, DB_File, Opcode, and re.
-
The
readline()
(aka ``diamond'') operator now works on ``our'' variables.
-
On Windows,
system()
and backticks behave more sanely with respect to
whitespace in arguments. Any whitespace inside quoted arguments are
correctly preserved. system()
with multiple arguments also automatically
quotes any arguments that contain whitespace by enclosing them in
double-quotes, as necessary. This improves portability of the standard
idiom of calling system()
with multiple arguments.
-
On Windows, IO::File::new_tmpfile() does not fail after 32767 calls
-
On Windows, entries in %ENV were sometimes being improperly propagated
to child processes if such entries happened to be at the end of the
internal process environment table. This misbehavior has been corrected.
-
PerlScript and Perl for ISAPI ignore the \\?\ prefix in new-fangled
file names returned by IIS in Windows XP.
-
In scripts running under PerlScript or Perl for ISAPI,
print()
with
more than one argument did not print the second and subsequent arguments.
This has been fixed.
-
The style and content of the included online documentation has been
extensively revised. On Windows, all the documentation is now provided
in fully searchable HTML Help format. Documentation in conventional
HTML format continues to be included only for Unix platforms, and can
also be downloaded separately.
-
Some of the bundled modules have been updated to their latest available
versions: libwin32 v0.18, URI v1.17, and SOAP-Lite v0.51 are now included.
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
Perl now uses the reentrant versions of time functions localtime_r(),
gmtime_r(), and
asctime_r()
on Unix platforms, making the corresponding
builtins and POSIX::asctime() thread-safe.
-
On Windows, child processes launched with Win32::Spawn() now correctly
inherit any modifications to %ENV done by the script.
-
On Windows, modifications to $ENV{PATH} in the script correctly affect
the lookup of executables in
system()
and backticks. Previous versions
did not propagate %ENV modifications completely enough for the underlying
CreateProcess()
system call to notice any changes.
-
A small number of minor bug fixes from the Perl development track have been
incorporated. See the ActivePerl source code diff for the complete list.
-
Compress-Zlib has been updated to v1.13.
-
libwin32 v0.173 is included.
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
A few bug fixes from the Perl development track have been incorporated.
See the ActivePerl source code diff for the complete list.
-
ActivePerl on Solaris does not use Perl's malloc by default. Sufficient
compatibility stubs are included such that binary compatibility with
previous builds will not be affected.
-
HTML-Parser has been updated to v3.25.
-
The included HTML documentation has many substantive and cosmetic
improvements.
-
Build 627 was not formally released to the public.
Build 626 is based on Perl 5.6.1. 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 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 that have been incorporated, please be sure
to test it thoroughly in a non-critical environment before you upgrade
your production systems.
Please check the perldelta.pod file in the Perl source distribution for
a list of the major changes in Perl. Only additional changes specific to
ActivePerl are mentioned here.
Bug Fixes and Changes
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me Installation
Installer now adds Perl/bin directory to the PATH environment variable for
Windows 9x. Windows 9x will need to be rebooted for this to take effect.
The PATH settings are not removed after an uninstallation.
-
PPM updated to 2.1.2. It now uses SOAP-Lite and has drastically
reduced bandwidth requirements for SUMMARY requests. This is a
prerequisite for supporting the new PPM repository containing most of
CPAN.
-
OLE Browser has been fixed to work on IE 5.5.
-
minor bug fixes to
fork()
emulation and duplication of socket handles
on Windows 9X.
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
Custom build for ActivePerl CDROM
-
MSI installer addes the CDROM repository to the ppm.xml file (Windows only)
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
bug fixes in environment setup for backticks and
system()
PerlScript
-
works now with IIS5. Previously ASP would sometimes return
an empty page when the page was accessed simultaneously from multiple clients.
-
supports OLE objects as parameters (VT_DISPATCH)
-
various namespace / package setup problems fixed
-
STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR are now available when run under WSH
-
JScript and VBScript functions can be called directly (on ASP pages)
Documentation
-
Commandline parameters for MSI installer documented (installation notes)
-
Win32 builtin documentation moved from Pod to Modules
Modules
-
CGI.pm updated to 2.74
-
Win32API::Net updated to version 0.09
Bug Fixes and Changes
Bug Fixes and Changes
Bug Fixes and Changes
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
Bug fixes imported from the Perl development track. See the following file
for the detailed log:
http://www.ActiveState.com/download/ActivePerl/src/5.6/AP615_diff.txt
Individual patches for each of these changes may also be obtained. See
perlhack.
-
On Unix platforms, ActivePerl is now built with the
-Duseithreads
Configure option, just as on Windows. While this provides a functionally
identical perl, it also makes this build binary incompatible with earlier
builds on Unix platforms. If you had installed any extensions (i.e. modules
with XS code) using earlier builds via PPM or otherwise, you will need
to reinstall them under this build. Future builds will maintain binary
compatibility with this one.
On Windows, this build continues to be binary compatible with build 613.
-
The installation location for the native installations on Unix (Red Hat
RPM, Debian dpkg, or Solaris pkgadd) have changed. These packages will
now be installed under /usr/local/ActivePerl-5.6/ rather than under
/usr/local/perl-5.6. This one-time change avoids confusion with locally
installed versions built from the sources, and also avoids installing
on top of existing binary-incompatible build 613 installations.
The installation location can be chosen as usual on Windows, and when
installing using the generic installers on Unix.
-
On Windows,
chdir()
could sometimes fail to return failure when given a
non-existent directory, and UNC paths didn't work correctly. These
problems have been corrected.
-
The
libwin32
v0.16 release from CPAN is included for the Windows
builds.
-
Various small PPM bugs have been fixed.
-
A bug in PerlScript that prevented it from working under IIS5 on
Windows 2000 has been fixed.
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
This build corresponds to the Perl 5.6.0 source code release.
-
This package contains some files that were missing in build 612.
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
This build corresponds to the Perl 5.6.0 source code release.
-
This build incorporates mostly minor bug fixes between 5.6.0 release
candidate 2 and the final 5.6.0 source code release. See perldelta
for a detailed summary of changes between 5.005 and 5.6.0.
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
This build corresponds to the Perl 5.6.0 release candidate 2 sources.
-
binmode()
now supports a second optional argument that can be used
to switch a file handle to ``:crlf'' or ``:raw'' mode. (These correspond
to the traditional text and binary modes.) See perlfunc/binmode.
-
The new
open
pragma can be used to set the default mode for
implicitly opened handles in the current lexical scope. This is
useful to set a particular mode for the results of the qx//
operator. See open.
-
The bundled ActivePerl documentation has been reorganized. Outdated
material has either been reworked to reflect the current status, or
removed when it was no longer applicable.
-
Many bugs in the beta releases have been fixed.
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
This build corresponds to the public Perl 5.6 beta 3 release, otherwise
known as v5.5.670.
-
The Windows version of the installer now supports installing into paths
that contain spaces.
-
Linux and Solaris install packages that allow non-privileged users to
install anywhere are supported. The system-specific packaging formats
that typically require root privileges continue to be available.
-
Support for
kill(0,$pid)
on Windows to test if process exists.
-
There is a new tutorial on Object Oriented Perl for beginners. See
`perlboot'.
-
The PPM repository has been updated with newer versions of modules for
all supported platforms.
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
This build corresponds to the public Perl 5.6 beta 1 release, otherwise
known as v5.5.650.
-
Several bugs in the Unicode support have been fixed.
-
Support for Unicode has changed from previous development versions. See
perlunicode.pod for details.
-
There is a new -C command-line switch to request that system calls use
the wide-character APIs. This can also be used in the shebang line.
-
The byte pragma can be used to force byte-semantics on Perl operations.
When not used, character semantics apply if the data is Unicode; otherwise,
byte semantics are used.
Bug Fixes and Changes
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
A few bugs in the
fork()
emulation have been fixed. perlfork.pod reflects
these changes.
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
NOTE:Build 603 is not binary compatible with earlier builds. If you have
compiled your own extensions with earlier builds, you will need to recompile
all of them.
-
Build 603 corresponds to Perl 5.005_62. Additional patches available
since 5.005_62 in the public Perl repository have been incorporated.
-
Preliminary support for
fork()
is included. See the perlfork.pod document
for details about this functionality.
-
Documentation in fully searchable HTMLHelp format is included.
-
Many of the included extensions from CPAN have been updated to newer
versions.
-
A large number of minor bugs in the Perl core have been fixed. See the
Changes file in the included sources for a detailed list.
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
Build 602 corresponds to Perl 5.005_60. Additional patches available
since 5.005_60 in the public Perl repository have been incorporated.
-
A number of pre-built extensions from CPAN are included in this release.
These may be installed using PPM or VPM (both of which are included).
Bug Fixes and Changes
-
Build 601 corresponds to Perl 5.005_57. Additional patches available
since 5.005_57 in the public Perl repository have been incorporated.
-
This build features a major reworking of the API exposed by the
PERL_OBJECT build option. The result is a well-defined Perl API (restricted to
C syntax) that provides very high degree of compatibility for extensions
available from CPAN.
-
Perl for ISAPI, PerlScript, PerlEz and PerlMsg have been modified to use
the new PERL_OBJECT API.
-
Visual Package Manager (VPM) is now available. VPM can be used to install
pre-built binaries from a package repository. One such is available at
http://www.activestate.com/packages/perl5_6/.
Major Changes
-
This series is built around development versions of Perl 5.006. Build 600
corresponds to Perl 5.005_57.
-
Significant changes that have occurred in the
5.006 development track are documented in perldelta.
-
Build 600 includes additional changes for supporting globalization. All
Win32 API calls made by Perl now follow the utf8 mode of the interpreter.
Wide versions of the API calls are made when utf8 is in effect. See utf8
for more information on enabling support for Unicode.
-
The 600 series is not binary compatible with builds in the 500 series. Any
extensions built using binaries from the ActivePerl 500 series will need
to be recompiled. Note especially that this applies to PPDs that may have
been built for 500 series builds.