Note: While ActivePerl 5.8 can still be licensed by Team Tier customers, it is no longer maintained or supported. For these reasons, we highly recommend moving to Perl 5.32, which offers native support for virtual environments, built-in dependency management, and an alternative to PPM that automatically builds and installs far more dependencies. Interested? Let us show you how it works.
We are happy to announce that we released ActivePerl 5.8.8.816 today. The main highlights over 5.8.7.815 are:
- Based on Perl 5.8.8, plus bug fixes and module updates
- Mac OS X version runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs
- 64 bit beta versions available for Windows, Linux and Solaris
As usual, you can download it via the main ActivePerl page:
/ActivePerl
Note that there is a separate link for downloading the 64 bit Beta versions.
Please send feedback to
activeperl-feedback
and report bugs at
bugs.ActiveState.com
We’ve appended the relevant section of the CHANGES-58.pod file to show some more detail on other changes from the previous release.
ActivePerl build 816, based on Perl 5.8.8.
Bug Fixes and Changes
- Perl 5.8.8 has been incorporated. See perl588delta.pod for a list of changes.
- ActivePerl build 816 is now also available as a 64 bit Beta release for Windows and Linux on x86_64, as well as Solaris on Sparc. The 64 bit Windows Beta does not include PerlScript, PerlEx, Perl for ISAPI, or PerlEz.
- The ActivePerl Community License has been clarified. It now explicitly allows you to redistribute certain parts of ActivePerl as part of applications generated by wrapping tools such as by PAR, PerlApp, and Perl2Exe. Please refer to the license text for actual terms and conditions.
- ActivePerl for Mac OS X is now a Universal binary that supports all Macintosh hardware natively.
- ActivePerl for Solaris is now built with the vendor compiler. Previous releases were built with the GNU compiler (gcc).
- ActivePerl::Config on Solaris and HP-UX now provides compatibility so that extensions can be built using gcc. This happens automatically if the vendor compiler is not available on the target system.
- ActivePerl now ships with a preinitialized CPAN::Config module. This avoids the need to go through the configuration dialog the first the CPAN shell is invoked. The configuration dialog can still be invoked by the o conf init command to the CPAN shell.
- Syntax colored documentation and ActiveState::Scineplex is now supported for all the Unix platforms.
- Passive transfer mode is now the default for Net::FTP. This mode is more likely to work with modern firewall setups.
- Problem where ‘perl -s’ wasn’t able to parse -foo=bar switches has been corrected.
- The stat() builtin would not return the expected result when passed a directory name with trailing slashes on Windows. This problem has been fixed. This problem caused the rmtree() function of the File::Path module introduced in build 815 to fail for such directory names on Windows.
- IO::Socket::INET is now more efficient and it does not rely on getprotobyname(“tcp”) to be functional any more.
- A problem where long groups entries could cause memory exhaustion has been fixed.
- A problem with the alarm() function on Windows 2003 has been fixed.
- The Tk module would sometimes fail to update the -cursor attribute of widgets for 64-bit builds of perl. This problem has now been fixed.
- Many bundled modules have been updated to their latest versions:
- Digest-SHA-2.11
- HTML-Tagset-3.10
- HTML-Parser-3.50
- HTML-Tree-3.1901
- IO-String-1.08
- libwww-perl-5.805
- Mac-Errors-1.11
- Win32-OLE-0.1704
