ActivePerl 821 -- Release Notes

Welcome, and thank you for downloading ActivePerl. This release corresponds to Perl version 5.8.8.

The following platforms are supported by this release:

For a chronological list of changes included in this and past releases, see the ActivePerl 5.8 Change Log.


Incompatibilities

Perl 5.8 is not binary compatible with Perl 5.6. In particular, do not attempt to use extensions or PPM packages built for ActivePerl 600 series builds with ActivePerl 800 series builds and vice versa. Please check Incompatible Changes in the perl58delta manpage for known source level incompatibilities between the Perl 5.8 releases and the earlier releases in the Perl 5.6 series.

You may also want to check Incompatible Changes in the perl581delta manpage, Incompatible Changes in the perl582delta manpage, and Incompatible Changes in the perl584delta manpage, for additional minor incompatible changes made in Perl 5.8.1, Perl 5.8.2 and Perl 5.8.4 respectively.

The following incompatibilities described below do not apply to HP-UX: Changed order in @INC, simplified directory structure, PPM4. These changes will be implemented for HP-UX in ActivePerl 5.10.

The order of the directories in @INC has changed since build 817 of ActivePerl. The $PREFIX/site/lib directory is now searched for modules before $PREFIX/lib. This means that core modules might be shadowed by what is installed locally and these updates might bring incompatibilities that break applications only tested against the original core module.

All modules that ActivePerl bundles in addition to the core modules are now installed in $PREFIX/lib. In ActivePerl build 817 and earlier, these were installed in $PREFIX/site/lib.

The $Config{siteprefix} is now $PREFIX/site. In ActivePerl build 817 and earlier, it was just $PREFIX and $Config{sitelib} compensated by introducing the site level. As a consequence programs included with packages installed into the site area now get installed in $PREFIX/site/bin. In ActivePerl build 817 and earlier, these were installed in $PREFIX/bin. Another consequence of the $Config{siteprefix} update is that modules configured and built with perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=... are now installed directly in the lib directory of the given PREFIX.

PPM version 4

PPM version 4 differs from version 3 (distributed with ActivePerl build 817 and earlier) in the following ways:


Known Issues

PPM

There are some known outstanding issues with the PPM 4 client:

AIX

The following issues are know to exists when installing ActivePerl on AIX:

Linux and Solaris

The following issues are know to exists when installing ActivePerl on Unix:

Mac OS X

Windows

The following issues are know to exists when installing ActivePerl on Windows:

Further Information

The Perl distribution comes with extensive documentation. On Unix platforms, all the standard documentation is installed as man pages under the Perl install location. The location of the man pages may need to be added to the MANPATH environment variable in order to access them. For example, in the C shell:

    % setenv MANPATH /opt/ActivePerl-5.8/man:$MANPATH

The documentation is installed in HTML format on all platforms. If ActivePerl was installed in /opt/ActivePerl-5.8 then the HTML documentation would be located in /opt/ActivePerl-5.8/html.

On Windows, the standard documentation along with Windows-specific Perl documentation is installed in HTML format, and is accessible from the "Start" menu.

Updated versions of the HTML documentation will always be available at the ActiveState website:

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


Reporting Problems

Please report any problems you encounter with this release at the following location:

    http://bugs.ActiveState.com/ActivePerl/

If you do not have web access, reports can be also sent via email to ActivePerl-Bugs@ActiveState.com. Please be sure to include detailed information about the platform in your message.

As far as possible, please ensure that there is enough information in the report to reproduce the bug elsewhere. It also helps to submit a minimal test case that exhibits the bug.