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Sender: cygwin-announce-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2003 18:37:46 +0200
From: "Gerrit P. Haase" <gerrit AT familiehaase DOT de>
Reply-To: "Gerrit P. Haase" <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Organization: Esse keine toten Tiere
Message-ID: <1861317620718.20030606183746@familiehaase.de>
To: cygwin-announce AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Updated: Perl 5.8.0
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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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=================================
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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

-- 
=^..^=