Subject: Perl 5.002 is released
From: Roderick Schertler <[email-masked]>
Date: 17 Mar 1996 00:50:24 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.announce,comp.lang.perl.misc

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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-masked].

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.

-- 
Roderick Schertler
[email-masked]