From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Oct 8 07:13:15 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 5429916A4CE for ; Fri, 8 Oct 2004 07:13:15 +0000 (GMT) Received: from happygiraffe.net (happygiraffe.net [81.6.215.59]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A614D43D41 for ; Fri, 8 Oct 2004 07:13:14 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from dom@happygiraffe.net) Received: from localhost (localhost.happygiraffe.net [127.0.0.1]) by happygiraffe.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4A6F9B97F; Fri, 8 Oct 2004 08:13:11 +0100 (BST) Received: from happygiraffe.net ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (ppe.happygiraffe.net [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with LMTP id 98290-07; Fri, 8 Oct 2004 08:13:10 +0100 (BST) Received: from [192.168.1.60] (CATHBAD.dyn.happygiraffe.net [192.168.1.60]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by happygiraffe.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 955EFB971; Fri, 8 Oct 2004 08:13:10 +0100 (BST) Message-ID: <41663DEA.7020403@happygiraffe.net> Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2004 08:12:42 +0100 From: Dominic Mitchell User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (Windows/20040913) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Garance A Drosihn References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at happygiraffe.net cc: rainer@ultra-secure.de cc: Ryan Newman 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: Fri, 08 Oct 2004 07:13:15 -0000 Garance A Drosihn wrote: > At 6:51 PM +0000 10/6/04, Ryan Newman wrote: >> 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. It's only really been RedHat that has caused problems, because RedHat somewhat prematurely set all the locales to be UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin-1). This combined with a feature of Perl 5.8.0, which sets up filehandles as being in UTF-8 by default if you're in a UTF-8 locale. Unfortunately this caused a lot of problems. In Perl 5.8.1 and newer, the UTF-8 locale is ignored. To get UTF-8 streams, you have to explicitly ask for them with -C. In summary, this is not the problem you make it out to be. Personally, I think it's all RedHat's fault for setting a non-"C" locale as the system default. I hate that, it makes so much other stuff behave badly. > 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. As mentioned above, RedHat in particular made life hard for their users. This was definitely the case in RedHat 8 and 9. I don't know about the newer Fedora Core releases, we've switched most of our Linux boxes to Debian now. > 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. As mentioned above, this is no longer the case since Perl 5.8.1[1]. > 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. 5.8.x has been stable Perl for over two years. You really /should/ be using it if at all possible. If not, then deinstall it and install your own Perl 5.004 package. You did want old Perl, didn't you? -Dom [1] http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl/pod/perl581delta.pod#UTF-8_On_Filehandles_No_Longer_Activated_By_Locale