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Perl 5.002 is released. (It was actually released on February 29th, but
we had a little mixup about getting the word out.)
Read the INSTALL file before installing the software! It will answer
most of your questions. If you still have problems after following the
advice therein read the hints file for your OS (if there is one). The
hints files are in the hints subdirectory of the source tree. If that
doesn't help contact the Perl5 Porters by sending mail to
[email protected].
Among the differences between this release and 5.001m are:
- Lots and lots of bugs were fixed. Doubtless new bugs were
introduced, but with any luck the bug population took a big net hit.
- The biggest new feature in the Perl core with this release is that
of subroutine prototypes. See the perlsub(1) man page for details.
- The documentation has been greatly expanded and enhanced, both for
the core and for the standard libraries. 5.002 contains about twice
as much documentation as 5.001m had. All of the standard libraries
have man pages now.
- A couple of new functions were added to the core (tied() and
sysopen()).
- Some new command line switches are supported by the perl binary (-h,
-m, -M, -V, -V:name and the :debugger part of -d:debugger), see
perlrun(1).
- A number of new standard modules were added, including
Devel::SelfStubber
DirHandle
File::Copy
FileCache
Pod::Text
Safe
SelectSaver
SelfLoader
Symbol
Text::Wrap
Tie::Scalar
diagnostics
overload
vars
See the individual man pages for details.
- A number of modules were greatly enhanced. (The FileHandle module
is definitely worth revisiting.)
- Some modules were renamed.
is now
------
TieHash Tie::Hash
SubstrHash Tie::SubstrHash
(We meant to leave stubs in place of the old names for these
(explaining where they went), but that slipped through the cracks.)
- The standard @INC path has been restructured a bit. The
architecture-dependant directory is now named after the version of
Perl it's meant to work with (/usr/local/lib/perl5/$arch/5.002, eg).
An additional architecture-dependant directory has been added under
site_perl (/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/$arch). Locally installed
modules now install into site_perl by default.
- A new standard sub-version number has been added so we can
circumvent "official unofficial" release numbers in the future,
beloved though they were. Subversions will be numbered like
5.002_01; `require 5.002_01' works as you'd expect (failing for
5.002, succeeding for 5.002_01, 5.002_23 and 5.003).
- Signal handlers installed via %SIG are now installed using
sigaction() on all platforms which support it.
Availability for non-Unix platforms:
- VMS: The standard distribution contains support for VMS, but due to
a last-minute glitch you can't use 5.002 as distributed. Sorry
about that. The 5.002_01 development release (coming soon) will
support VMS. It will be found on CPAN in the src/5.0/unsupported
directory.
- OS/2: 5.002 builds on OS/2. Read the files in the os2/ directory
of the distribution.
- Windows 95 and Windows NT: The most current version of Perl for
your system is still based on 5.001m, unfortunately. See
http://www.perl.hip.com
for more info.
- Mac, DOS, Windows 3.1 and Amiga: Perl 5.002 isn't available for any
of these platforms yet. Watch comp.lang.perl.announce for
availability.
The 5.002 distribution file is 1544222 bytes big. The MD5 hash of it is
MD5(perl5.002.tar.gz): 2c76296aee35a98451110d3d985cae65
You can download it from
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/5.0/perl5.002.tar.gz
, this will actually connect you to a CPAN site near you (for some
definition of near) (Thanks, Tom!). If you want to do it the old
fashioned way it's in the file
src/5.0/perl5.002.tar.gz
at all the CPAN sites. (CPAN is the Comprehensive Perl Archive
Network.) The currently registered CPAN sites are
Africa
South Africa
ftp://ftp.is.co.za/programming/perl/CPAN/
Asia
Japan
ftp://ftp.lab.kdd.co.jp/lang/perl/CPAN/
Taiwan
ftp://dongpo.math.ncu.edu.tw/perl/CPAN/
Australasia
Australia
ftp://coombs.anu.edu.au/pub/perl/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.mame.mu.oz.au/pub/perl/CPAN/
New Zealand
ftp://ftp.tekotago.ac.nz/pub/perl/CPAN/
Canada
British Columbia
ftp://mango.pinc.com/pub/mirrors/CPAN/
Europe
Austria
ftp://ftp.tuwien.ac.at/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/
Czech Republic
ftp://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz/MIRRORS/ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/
Denmark
ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/
Finland
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/
France
ftp://ftp.ibp.fr/pub/perl/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.pasteur.fr/pub/computing/unix/perl/CPAN/
Germany
ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/programming/languages/perl/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.rz.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/pub/CPAN/
Greece
ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/lang/perl/
Poland
ftp://ftp.pk.edu.pl/pub/lang/perl/CPAN/
Portugal
ftp://ftp.ci.uminho.pt/pub/lang/perl/
Slovenia
ftp://ftp.arnes.si/software/perl/CPAN/
Spain
ftp://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/CPAN/
Sweden
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/lang/perl/CPAN/
Switzerland
ftp://ftp.switch.ch/mirror/CPAN/
the Netherlands
ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/PERL/CPAN/
UK
ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/mirrors/perl/CPAN/
ftp://unix.hensa.ac.uk/mirrors/perl-CPAN/
USA
California
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/perl/CPAN/
Florida
ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu/pub/perl/CPAN/
Illinois
ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/lang/perl/CPAN/
Massachusetts
ftp://ftp.delphi.com/pub/mirrors/packages/perl/CPAN/
Oklahoma
ftp://ftp.uoknor.edu/mirrors/CPAN/
Texas
ftp://ftp.metronet.com/pub/perl/
ftp://ftp.sedl.org/pub/mirrors/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.sterling.com/CPAN/
A note about the next release: 5.002_01 and above will enable EMBED by
default. This will break binary compatibility with 5.001m and 5.002.
This means that when you install 5.002_01 you'll have to recompile all
your locally installed dynamically loadable modules. We're going to try
to make that the last time that recompiling modules will be necessary
for a while.
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--
Roderick Schertler
[email protected]
