ActivePerl 5.10 Change Log

For the latest information on ActivePerl, please see:

    http://www.ActiveState.com/ActivePerl/

Build 1003 Thursday, May 15, 2008

Bug Fixes and Changes since build 1002

• ActivePerl::Config on Windows now dynamically sets the $Config{ccversion} to the version of cl.exe. This allows ExtUtils::MakeMaker to generate and embed manifest files into extension DLL when required by the specific version of the C compiler.

• The GCC support for Windows in ActivePerl::Config now adds the -mms-bitfields option to the ccflags when compiling with GCC. This forces identical struct layouts with Visual C++, which is used to compile ActivePerl itself. This has become important because core Perl 5.10 now uses bit-fields for some important structures.

• On OS X the supplied sitecustomize.pl script adds the ~/Library/ActivePerl/lib directory to @INC, and PPM will install into this directory by default because the /usr/local/ActivePerl-5.10/site/lib directory isn't writable without sudo. Unfortunately ~/Library/ActivePerl/lib was also used by ActivePerl 5.8, so you could end up with a mixture of 5.8 and 5.10 modules in that directory. This release uses ~/Library/ActivePerl-5.10/lib as a per-user Perl 5.10 specific module area.

• Signal handling code would segfault with some Linux kernel and glibc versions. This problem has been fixed.

• On Windows there is a special form of them system() function to start processes asynchronously: system(1, $cmd). It returns the process id instead of the exit status so that the spawning application can eventually use waitpid() to wait for the external process to terminate. Previous Perl releases only returned the lower 16 bits of the process id; this version returns all 32 bits.

• The following modules have been added to ActivePerl 5.10.0.1003:

      Algorithm-Diff-1.1902
      Bit-Vector-6.4
      Carp-Clan-6.00
      Class-Accessor-0.31
      Crypt-SSLeay-0.57
      DBD-CSV-0.22
      DBD-ODBC-1.15
      DBD-Oracle-1.21
      Date-Calc-5.4
      File-HomeDir-0.69
      File-Which-0.05
      GD-2.39
      GD-Graph-1.4308
      GD-Text-0.86
      JSON-2.09
      JSON-XS-2.2
      Net-Telnet-3.03
      PPM-Repositories-0.14
      SQL-Statement-1.15
      Sub-Uplevel-0.1901
      Test-Differences-0.47
      Test-Exception-0.27
      Text-CSV_XS-0.45
      Text-Diff-0.35
      Text-Glob-0.08
      WWW-Mechanize-1.34-r1
      Win32-API-0.55
      YAML-LibYAML-0.26

  The DBD::Oracle module is only included in the 32-bit releases of ActivePerl for Windows and Linux. It does not include the Oracle client libraries; instead it requires that either the regular client libraries or the Oracle Instant Client is already installed on configured on the system.

  ActiveState recommends DBI and DBD::ODBC for accesssing databases using ODBC. The Win32::ODBC module continues to be provided for backwards compatibility, but new code should exclusively use DBD::ODBC.

  The PPM-Repositories module supplies a list of PPM repositories provided by sources outside ActiveState. It makes it easier to discover and configure additional repositories in PPM. For example you can display a list of repositories available for the current platform with:

      ppm repo suggest

  Adding e.g. the University of Winnipeg repository maintained by Randy Kobes is then as easy as:

      ppm repo add uwinnipeg

  The PPM-Repositories list is used by the PPM GUI client as well.

• The following modules have been updated to their latest version:

      DBI upgraded from 1.601 to 1.604

      HTML-Tagset upgraded from 3.10 to 3.20

      LWP upgraded from 5.808 to 5.812-r1

      URI upgraded from 1.35 to 1.36

• The libwin32 module collection has been replaced by its individual modules. This will make it easier to update these modules via PPM in the future:

      Win32-Clipboard
      Win32-Console
      Win32-EventLog
      Win32-File
      Win32-FileSecurity
      Win32-IPC
      Win32-Internet
      Win32-Job
      Win32-NetAdmin
      Win32-NetResource
      Win32-ODBC
      Win32-OLE
      Win32-PerfLib
      Win32-Process
      Win32-Registry
      Win32-Service
      Win32-Shortcut
      Win32-Sound
      Win32-TieRegistry
      Win32-WinError
      Win32API-File
      Win32API-Net
      Win32API-Registry

Build 1002 Monday, Dec 31, 2007

Bug Fixes and Changes since build 1001

• Build 1002 fixes a problem with the Perl-for-ISAPI, PerlEz, PerlEx and PerlScript extensions (they do not work at all in build 1001). All these extensions are available in the 32-bit Windows release only.

• This build re-enables the sitecustomize.pl feature in the non-Windows builds.

• The tkkit libraries used by the Tkx module have been updated with the latest changes from ActiveTcl 8.4. For Mac OS X this includes specific fixes for OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

Build 1001 Tuesday, Dec 18, 2007

What's new in the 1000 Series

• This build corresponds to the Perl 5.10.0 source code release.

• The 1000 series builds of ActivePerl are not binary compatible with builds in the 600 or 800 series. Any extensions built using binaries from the ActivePerl 600 or 800 series will need to be recompiled. Note especially that this applies to PPM packages that may have been built for 600 or 800 series builds.

• Significant changes that have occurred in the 5.10.0 release are documented in the perl5100delta manpage.

• The Time::Local module has been fixed to work properly with 64-bit versions of ActivePerl for dates beyond 2038.

• The limit on the number of sockets that can be specified in a single select() call on Windows has been increased from about 64 to over 2000. Please note though that using select() with a large number of sockets on Windows is rather slow.

Build 1000 Beta Thursday, Nov 22, 2007

This build is based on the first release candidate of the Perl 5.10 source code release. Since Perl 5.10 is not yet complete, this build is designated as a Beta and will be followed by a final build once Perl 5.10 is officially released.

Please use this beta build to try out new features in Perl 5.10 and to test source level compatibility of your existing Perl code under this new release (note that Perl 5.10 is not binary compatible to earlier releases).