Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/06/06/12:43:18
Hello,
I've updated the Perl for Cygwin distribution to 5.8.0-3
-- it should be on your favorite mirror soon.
News: Changes: - Moved Cygwin to the non DOSish platforms.
- Updated CPAN module to v1.70_54
Therefore it is no longer needed to define PERLIO in the environment
as it defaults to PERLIO=stdio now if it is not set. However iff
LF -> CR/LF *conversion* in perl generated output is wanted now, one
needs to define PERLIO=crlf in her environment or at the commandline:
Default now:
============
$ /bin/perl -e 'print "\n";'|od -a
0000000 nl
0000001
$ PERLIO=crlf /bin/perl -e 'print "\n";'|od -a
0000000 cr nl
0000002
Default was before the change:
==============================
$ /bin/perl -e 'print "\n";'|od -a
0000000 cr nl
0000002
THIS IS A REAL NEW PERL RELEASE THAT IS BINARY INCOMPATIBLE WITH ANY
PREVIOUS PERL RELEASE. THIS MEANS THAT YOUR OLD EXTENSIONS (.xs code,
those Perl modules requiring a C compiler) WILL NOT WORK AND WILL HAVE
TO BE RECOMPILED. (Pure Perl modules should continue working.)
As always, you should conduct an appropriate level of testing before
using any new product in your production environment.
INSTALLATION:
=============
To update your installation, click on the "Install Cygwin now" link on
the http://cygwin.com/ web page. This downloads setup.exe to your
system. Save it and run setup, answer the questions and pick up
'perl' from the 'Interpreters' category. The perl manpages are in a
separate package called perl_manpages in the category 'Doc'.
Previous perl installed with setup.exe will be removed, but your
custom modules won't be removed. See 'Modules' and 'Different Perl
versions' section in the 'NOTES' below for details about possibilities
of custom installation.
DOWNLOAD:
=========
Note that downloads from sources.redhat.com (aka cygwin.com) aren't
allowed due to bandwidth limitations. This means that you will need
to find a mirror which has this update.
These mirrors already got the package, the others will probably have
the latest version of this package fairly soon:
In the US,
ftp://planetmirror.com/pub/cygwin/ and
ftp://mirrors.rcn.net/mirrors/sources.redhat.com/cygwin/
are reliable high bandwidth connection.
QUESTIONS:
==========
If you want to make a point or ask a question the Cygwin mailing
list is the appropriate place.
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NOTES
=====
README
------
A short document, perl-5.8.0.README is provided in /usr/doc/Cygwin.
The output of 'perl -V' gives some infos about the compiletime and
runtime settings of this perl binary.
Different Perl versions:
------------------------
It is possible to use more than one perl. To achieve this you cannot
use setup.exe since it will remove an older perl before it installs
perl-5.8.0, so you'll need to install one of your perls manually.
>From your scripts you can call the different perl versions now with e.g.
perl5.6.1 or perl5.8.0, /usr/bin/perl will be the version you installed
lastly (and also the scripts, so it is probably a good idea to install
perl-5.8.0 after perl-5.6.1;).
PerlIO
------
See news above.
>From the official 'Perl 5.8.0 Release Announcement'
---------------------------------------------------
- New IO Implementation:
the new PerlIO implementation is both a portable stdio implementation
(at the source code level) and a flexible new framework for richer
I/O behaviours
- Better Unicode Support:
Unicode support has been much enhanced since 5.6, at all levels:
- now supports Unicode 3.2.0 (5.6.1 supports 3.0.1)
- at the language (and internals) level Unicode support is
now more ubiquitous and robust
- regular expressions now work with Unicode
- support for non-Latin encodings (such as the various
Chinese/Japanese/Korean encodings) through the Encode module
- Better Numeric Accuracy:
previous Perls relied on vendors' string-to-number and back
routines which in some cases proved to be too much trust
leading to nonportable and wrong behaviours
- 64-bit support:
64-bit support is now considered to be mature -- if your platform
supports 64-bit integers or address space, you can compile Perl to
use those
- Safe Signals:
in previous versions of Perl signals could corrupt Perl's internal
state
- Many New Modules:
Digest::MD5, File::Temp, Filter::Simple, libnet, List::Util,
Memoize, MIME::Base64, Scalar::Util, Storable, Switch,
Test::More, Test::Simple, Text::Balanced, Tie::File, ...
Incompatibilities
- BINARY INCOMPATIBLE:
mainly because of the PerlIO introduction, Perl 5.8 is not
binary compatible with any earlier Perl release, XS MODULES
WILL HAVE TO BE RECOMPILED!
- Unicode Model Changed (no more "use utf8", almost)
In Perl 5.6 "Unicodeness" was lexically scoped to the operations;
in Perl 5.8 "Unicodeness" is bound to the data. The only remaining
use of "use utf8" is when the Perl script itself is written in the
UTF-8 encoding of Unicode.
- This Perl version is compiled without threads support, though it is
possible to compile Perl with internal threads on Cygwin it is still
experimental, see the Cygwin Perl source package for hints how to
build a threaded perl.
As always, you should conduct an appropriate level of testing before
using any new product in your production environment.
MAINTAINER:
===========
Gerrit P. Haase, 2003-06-06
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