NAME

macperldelta - what is new for MacPerl v5.8.0

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.6.1 release and the 5.8.0 release.

This document covers changes specific to MacPerl. For general changes to perl, you might also want to read perl5005delta for changes between 5.004 and 5.005, perl56delta for changes from 5.005 to 5.6, and perldelta for changes from 5.6 to present.

For changes from MacPerl 5.2.0r4 to 5.6.1, see macperl56delta.

Highlights In MacPerl 5.8.0

Update to perl 5.8 sources

Incompatible Changes

Shared Libraries Incompatible

This is mentioned elsewhere in the perl documentation but bears repeating here: shared libraries made for use with perl 5.004 (and MacPerl 5.2.0r4) or perl 5.6 (and MacPerl 5.6.1) are not supported for use with perl 5.8 (and MacPerl 5.8).

The MacPerl Module Porters page has been updated to note whether a particular distribution is for 5.004, 5.6, or 5.8.

        http://dev.macperl.org/mmp

Note: With cpan-mac it was recommended that site_perl be added to the Libraries preferences, so that its modules would override the ones that came with MacPerl. If you keep your old site_perl, MacPerl will fail. Either clean it out, or remove it from the Libraries preferences.

See macperl56delta

There are other important incompatible changes with MacPerl 5.8 and MacPerl 5.2.0r4 that are mentioned in macperl56delta.

Core Enhancements

Update to 5.8 sources

See the relevant perl core documentation for what all this means, but of particular interest note that MacPerl now has extensive support for Unicode and alternate character sets.

See README.macos in the perl source and http://dev.macperl.org/ for more information about the sources.

Modules and Pragmata

Bundled Modules

The modules below are, in addition to the Mac:: modules and the Perl standard library, included with the MacPerl distribution. They are included because they are basic functionality needed for using CPAN and installing other modules, or have general utility.

Many extra modules included with MacPerl 5.6 are now part of the standard distribution, and so are still included but are not listed here.

The modules are listed with their version number, and followed by any bugs or behavior differences.

Archive::Tar 0.22

Compress::Zlib 1.16

Convert::BinHex 1.119

File::Sort 1.00

HTML::Parser 3.25

HTML::Tagset 3.03

LWP 5.63

Mac::Conversions 1.04

Mac::FileSpec::Unixish 1.11

MailTools 1.42

MD5 2.02

MLDBM 2.00

Net::Telnet 3.02

URI 1.18

file:foo.txt != file:./foo.txt in heuristics.t.

Escape test encodes [ and ] in old-base.t, rfc2732.t.

Updated And Improved Modules and Pragmata

Some of the Mac:: modules have minor bugfixes.
ExtUtils::MM_MacOS has undergone some overhaul, as MakeMaker has been reworked.

Selected Bug Fixes

There have been more fixes to make @INC and lib.pm smarter about accepting Unix-like and Mac-like paths.

Known Problems

system doesn't return a good value, and $? is fairly useless.
The version of sfio we use has problems with the %g and %f sprintf formats. "%.0f", 0.6 should give 1, but gives 0. %g should pad with zeroes, but pads with spaces.
sysread should warn when passed a filehandle opened for read-only, but does not.
taint mode thing
alarm stuff
%ENV is not as magical as, or more magical than, you might want it to be. Among other problems, %ENV = () does not clear out %ENV, and the environment does not carry over to system calls.
There is no support for the Encode module or the Mac:: toolbox modules in the 68K builds. This may change.
There is no support for PPC sockets in the Socket module. This may change.
Currently, the MPW perl binary created with the MrC compiler will crash MPW after it loads shared libraries. However, shared libraries built with MrC can be used with the standard binaries, or by other binaries created with the MWCPPC compiler, with no ill effects.

Reporting Bugs

If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the macperl@perl.org mailing list (http://lists.perl.org/) and the MacPerl bug database (http://dev.macperl.org/).

If you believe you have an unreported bug in MacPerl, please go to the MacPerl bug database. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. If running the MPW tool, include the output of perl -V. If running the application, run the ``One Liner'' MacPerl script, and execute the text perl -V.

Also please include the model of your computer and version of your operating system in the bug report (e.g., ``PowerBook G3/400 running Mac OS 9.2.2''), as well as any additional information that might be useful. If there is a system crash or odd system behavior, consider attaching a report from Apple System Profiler, included with most recent versions of Mac OS.

HISTORY

Written by Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>.

Last modified 2002.06.01.