From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Oct 6 19:12:04 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A099116A4CE for ; Wed, 6 Oct 2004 19:12:04 +0000 (GMT) Received: from smtp4.server.rpi.edu (smtp4.server.rpi.edu [128.113.2.4]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2893E43D5A for ; Wed, 6 Oct 2004 19:12:04 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.netel.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by smtp4.server.rpi.edu (8.13.0/8.13.0) with ESMTP id i96JC1PP011332; Wed, 6 Oct 2004 15:12:02 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 15:12:00 -0400 To: "Ryan Newman" , rainer@ultra-secure.de From: Garance A Drosihn Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-CanItPRO-Stream: default X-RPI-SA-Score: undef - spam-scanning disabled X-Scanned-By: CanIt (www . canit . ca) cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: perl 5.8.5 X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 19:12:04 -0000 At 6:51 PM +0000 10/6/04, Ryan Newman wrote: >>From: Rainer Duffner >> >>Is there actually anything that doesn't work with 5.8 but does >>work with 5.6? > >The biggest problem is that 5.8 defaults to unicode support which >ends up breaking a lot of complex applications. I know that linux >has shifted from 5.6 to 5.8 and this has caused a lot of people >problems on the linux platform. Here at work we are in the process of upgrading some older Linux systems to a newer release of Redhat, and we have been nailed by these unicode-related bugs in perl, particularly with some regexp patterns. In some cases this has caused a few scripts to fail in subtle ways, which is to say the script "succeeds" and claims everything went just fine, but the script didn't actually do what it was supposed to do, and what it had been doing for the past few years. In at least some of those cases, I think these are BUGS in the way perl handles the expression, and not "unavoidable consequences of Unicode support". That's just my opinion, though. I don't know if perl 5.8 on FreeBSD will cause the same issues. I have the impression that the default for unicode-handling can be changed on a system-wide basis (at least on Redhat), but I am not sure of the details. Even though I have hit some of these problems, I do think it is a good idea to make the change to 5.8 as part of FreeBSD 5.3-release. People should be taking a bit more time to check, cross-check, and re-check everything they are running if they are upgrading to 5.3-release from 4.x-release. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu