Perl 5.002 Release Notes

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 perl5-porters@nicoh.com.

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.
Several new programs will be installed by default. make install will install the following programs:
- perl and perl5.002 [links]
- suidperl and sperl5.002 (maybe) [links]
- find2perl, s2p, h2ph, c2ph and pstruct [links], and h2xs
- perldoc and perlbug
- pod2man, pod2html, pod2text, and pod2latex
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
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/$arch/5.002, eg). An additional architecture-dependent directory has been added under site_perl (/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/$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(3) 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.

Where to Get Source

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

North America

British Columbia: ftp://mango.pinc.com/pub/mirrors/CPAN/
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/

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/
The Netherlands: ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/PERL/CPAN/
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/
United Kingdom: ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/mirrors/perl/CPAN/; ftp://unix.hensa.ac.uk/mirrors/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/

Asia

Japan: ftp://ftp.lab.kdd.co.jp/lang/perl/CPAN/
Taiwan: ftp://dongpo.math.ncu.edu.tw/perl/CPAN/

Africa South Africa ftp://ftp.is.co.za/programming/perl/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.

AUTHOR

Perl by Larry Wall <lwall@perl.com> and a cast of thousands.
These release notes by Roderick Schertler <roderick@gate.net>.
This HTML by Tom Christiansen <tchrist@perl.com>, who also maintains the Perl documentation and the Perl Bugs Database.