ActivePerl 5.8 Change Log
    For the latest information on ActivePerl, please see:

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

  Build 810 Monday, Jun 7, 2004
    Build 810 is based on Perl 5.8.4.

    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *       Perl 5.8.4 has been incorporated. See perl584delta for a list of
            changes.

    *       Many bundled modules have been updated to their latest versions:

                Archive-Tar-1.08
                Compress-Zlib-1.33
                Data-Dump-1.03
                Digest-1.08
                Digest-MD5-2.33
                Digest-SHA1-2.10
                File-CounterFile-1.04
                Font-AFM-1.19
                HTML-Parser-3.36
                MD5-2.03
                MIME-Base64-3.01
                Tk-804.027
                URI-1.30
                XML-Simple-2.12
                XML-XSLT-0.48 (only for HP-UX))
                libnet-1.18
                libwww-perl-5.79
                perl-ldap-0.31 (only for HP-UX))

  Build 809 Monday, Feb 2, 2004
    Build 809 is based on Perl 5.8.3.

    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *       Perl 5.8.3 has been incorporated. See perl583delta for a list of
            changes.

    *       The Win32 module now includes the Win32::IsAdminUser() function
            that checks if the current interpreter runs with Administrator
            privileges.

    *       The access violations of detached threads on thread exit have
            been fixed.

    *       Time::HiRes now provides high resolution on Windows too.

  Build 808 Thursday, Dec 6, 2003
    Build 808 is based on Perl 5.8.2.

    *Changes*

    *       Perl 5.8.2 has been incorporated. See perl582delta for a list of
            changes.

            ActivePerl build 808 is still being compiled with the
            "-DNO_HASH_SEED" option to maintain binary compatibility with
            earlier releases. Perl 5.8.2 implements a new rehashing scheme
            that will kick in dynamically based on the actual data being
            stored in a hash. This new scheme is backwards compatible and is
            enabled in ActivePerl build 808.

    *       The following modules are bundled with ActivePerl for HP-UX and
            have been updated to their latest versions:

                Convert-ASN1-0.18
                XML-DOM-1.43
                XML-XPath-1.13
                XML-XSLT-0.45
                perl-ldap-0.30

  Build 807 Thursday, Nov 6, 2003
    Build 807 is based on Perl 5.8.1. 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 5.8.0 and 5.8.1 that have been
    incorporated, please be sure to test it thoroughly in a non-critical
    environment before you upgrade your production systems.

    Please check perl581delta for a list of the major changes in Perl. Only
    additional changes specific to ActivePerl are mentioned here.

    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *       Perl 5.8.1 has been incorporated. See perl581delta for a list of
            changes.

            Important note: The new *Hash Randomisation* feature has been
            disabled in ActivePerl because it is not compatible with Perl
            5.8.0. If we enabled this feature then some modules compiled
            with 5.8.0 would not work correctly with 5.8.1 and most modules
            compiled with 5.8.1 would not work at all with Perl 5.8.0. This
            would require maintaining separate PPM module repositories for
            5.8.0 and 5.8.1.

            To enable the *Hash Randomisation* feature you must recompile
            ActivePerl from source and remove the "-DNO_HASH_SEED"
            definition from the C compiler options. In that case you must
            compile all CPAN modules yourself too because the PPM repository
            binaries will not be compatible.

    *       Windows 2003 Server is now officially supported. The installer
            adds entries to the IIS6 "Web Services Extensions" list for both
            "Perl CGI" and "Perl ISAPI". Both are set to "Prohibited" by
            default and must be explicitly changed to "Allow" in the IIS
            Manager.

            Win32::GetOSName() detects the release version of Windows 2003
            correctly.

    *       ActiveState::Rx module has been included. This module is
            necessary to use the Rx Toolkit in ActiveState Visual Perl. You
            must upgrade Visual Perl to version 1.8.1 to use the Rx Toolkit
            with Perl 5.8.

    *       Many bundled modules have been updated to their latest versions:

                Archive-Tar-1.07
                Compress-Zlib-1.22
                Data-Dump-1.01
                Digest-MD2-2.03
                Digest-MD5-2.30
                Digest-SHA1-2.06
                File-CounterFile-1.01
                HTML-Parser-3.34
                HTML-Tree-3.18
                URI-1.27
                XML-Parser-2.34
                XML-Simple-2.09
                libwin32-0.21
                libwww-perl-5.75

            In addition, IO::Zlib version 1.01 is now included with
            ActivePerl.

    *PPM*

    *       The *upgrade* command has been fixed.

    *       It is now possible to install from a file URL while not being
            connected to the internet.

    *       PPM now works on Windows even when the Term::InKey module is
            installed.

    *Perl for ISAPI*

    *       Perl for ISAPI no longer uses line buffering for STDOUT. This is
            especially important for running under IIS6 which bypasses
            TCP/IP nagling and directly sends every packet individually.

    *       Perl for ISAPI used to close all open file handles before
            shutting down the Perl interpreter. The intention was to prevent
            file handle leaks from buggy Perl scripts while running inside
            the IIS process. Unfortunately Perl may still execute END blocks
            or call DESTROY methods during final destruction and some file
            handles may get closed twice in this scenario.

            This creates a race condition: the file handle may already have
            been re-opened by a different thread before the second close
            happens. Perl then closes a file handle it doesn't own anymore.
            This may cause a different page request to fail.

            To avoid this race condition Perl for ISAPI will no longer try
            to automatically close open file handles. Therefore it is
            possible that broken Perl applications will now start leaking
            file handles if they don't close them correctly themselves.

  Build 806 Monday, March 31, 2003
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *       Several bug fixes and other improvements have been merged from
            the Perl development track. In particular, many of these fixes
            address problems in the PerlIO implementation. See the
            ActivePerl source code diff for the complete list of included
            changes.

    *       Other minor bug fixes and documentation updates.

    *PPM*

    PPM has been upgraded to version 3.1. It fixes most of the known
    problems, including:

    *       PPM 3.1 now provides all the functionality of PPM 2.0 and 3.0.
            PPM 2.0 is therefore no longer included in ActivePerl 5.8.

    *       PPM now works correctly through a proxy server requiring basic
            authentication. Previous versions of PPM 3.0 only supported
            proxy servers that did not require authentication.

    *       PPM is now more robust in handling user-defined repository URLs.
            For instance, URLs with a trailing slash no longer result in
            fatal errors.

    *       Support for ASPN Perl profiles has been much improved. However,
            at the time of this writing, the ActivePerl 5.8 repositories do
            not yet support profiles. This is expected to become available
            shortly.

    *       In previous versions of PPM 3, incorrect search results from the
            repository (such as package names that do not have corresponding
            PPD files) could crash the PPM3 client. PPM now generates
            meaningful error messages under these circumstances.

  Build 805 Thursday, Feb 6, 2003
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *       Several bug fixes and other improvements have been merged from
            the Perl development track. In particular, many of these fixes
            address weaknesses in Unicode support. See the ActivePerl source
            code diff for the complete list of included changes.

    *       Bugs in the Perl 5.8 integration of Perl for ISAPI and
            PerlScript that resulted in failure to flush output correctly at
            the termination of the script have been fixed.

    *       On Windows, system() and backticks could return invalid status
            when running under environments where the process has to handle
            Windows messages. PerlScript and Perl for ISAPI fall under this
            category. The problem has been corrected.

    *       On Windows, PerlScript and Perl for ISAPI were affected by a
            reentrancy problem, which meant that recursive invocation of
            these two engines could fail. This problem has been corrected.

    *       Tk and libwww-perl has been updated to their latest versions.

    *       Win32::Shortcut no longer calls CoUninitialize() within an END
            block. This avoids random coredumps from this module when its
            DESTROY methods happen to get called after the END block
            executes.

    *       PPM v2 and v3 can now optionally generate HTML documentation
            when installing packages if POD documentation is found in the
            package. This is controlled by the rebuildhtml option in PPM v2
            and the rebuild-html option in PPM v3.

    *       Other minor bug fixes and documentation updates.

  Build 804 Friday, Nov 29, 2002
    *What's new in the 800 Series*

    *       This build corresponds to the Perl 5.8.0 source code release.

    *       The 800 series builds of ActivePerl are not binary compatible
            with builds in the 500 or 600 series. Any extensions built using
            binaries from the ActivePerl 500 or 600 series will need to be
            recompiled. Note especially that this applies to PPM packages
            that may have been built for 500 or 600 series builds.

    *       Significant changes that have occurred in the 5.8.0 release are
            documented in perl58delta.

    *       Support has been enabled for large file access on all platforms,
            meaning that file manipulation facilities within perl can cope
            with files larger than 2GB or 4GB.

    *       Many new modules are included as a standard part of perl 5.8.0.
            See "Modules and Pragmata" in perl58delta for a detailed list.
            In addition, the Data::Dump module is now included with
            ActivePerl. Many other modules have been updated to their latest
            versions.

    *       PPM v3 is now included as the default "ppm" executable. PPM v2
            continues to be available, and can be executed as "ppm2".

