Enhancements were made to code features such as "use", which now explicitly enables feature bundles, a more consistent "eval" operator, and a revamped "substr" function. The "__SUB__" sequence now returns a reference to the current subroutine, allowing for recursive subroutines to be written more simply. Support for Unicode 6.1 was improved. Many other minor improvements and bugfixes, along with several deprecations, were made
assembler to adapt them to the distance. m68k gas appears not to do
that for fpu branch insns, resulting in an out-of-range FPU assembler
branch instruction error in "ext/re/re_exec.c".
As a workaround, building with "-Os" instead of "-O2" reduces the size
of the object file enough to allow short branches.
See PR toolchain/45439.
* Updates of many standard Perl modules.
* Performance enhancements for loadable modules and memory usage.
* Fixed bug when running with "-w". Previously when running with
warnings enabled globally via "-w", selective disabling of specific
warning categories would actually turn off all warnings. This
is now fixed; now "no warnings 'io';" will only turn off warnings
in the "io" class. This bug fix may cause some programs to start
correctly issuing warnings.
* Perl 5.8.4 introduced a change so that assignments of "undef" to a
scalar, or of an empty list to an array or a hash, were optimised away.
As this could cause problems when "goto" jumps were involved, this
change has been backed out.
* Using the sprintf function with some formats could lead to a
buffer overflow in some specific cases. This has been fixed,
along with several other bugs, notably in bounds checking.
* Fixed bug in pkgsrc-installed perl-5.8.7 and all subsequent
PKGREVISIONs, where perl didn't look for site modules under
/usr/pkg/lib/perl5/site_perl, but only under
/usr/pkg/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0, and similarly for the vendor
modules.
* Honor PKGMANDIR when installing man pages.
