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Welcome, and thank you for downloading ActivePerl. This release
corresponds to Perl version 5.8.8.
The following platforms are supported by this release:
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AIX 5.1 or later (rs6000)
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HP-UX: 11.00 or later (PA-RISC)
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HP-UX: 11.22 or later (IA64)
=item *
Linux: glibc 2.2 or later (x86)
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Linux: glibc 2.3 or later (x64)
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Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" or later (x86 or powerpc)
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Solaris 2.6 or later (sparc, 32 and 64 bit)
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Solaris 10 or later (x86)
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Windows 9x, Me, NT, 2000 (x86)
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Windows XP and 2003 (x86 and x64)
For a chronological list of changes included in this and past releases,
see the ActivePerl 5.8 Change Log.
Perl 5.8 is not binary compatible with Perl 5.6. In particular, do not
attempt to use extensions or PPM packages built for ActivePerl 600
series builds with ActivePerl 800 series builds and vice versa. Please
check Incompatible Changes in the perl58delta manpage for known source level
incompatibilities between the Perl 5.8 releases and the earlier releases
in the Perl 5.6 series.
You may also want to check Incompatible Changes in the perl581delta manpage,
Incompatible Changes in the perl582delta manpage, and Incompatible Changes in the perl584delta manpage, for additional minor incompatible changes made in Perl 5.8.1, Perl
5.8.2 and Perl 5.8.4 respectively.
The following incompatibilities described below do not apply to HP-UX:
Changed order in @INC, simplified directory structure, PPM4. These
changes will be implemented for HP-UX in ActivePerl 5.10.
The order of the directories in @INC has changed since build 817 of
ActivePerl. The $PREFIX/site/lib directory is now searched for
modules before $PREFIX/lib. This means that core modules might be
shadowed by what is installed locally and these updates might bring
incompatibilities that break applications only tested against the
original core module.
All modules that ActivePerl bundles in addition to the core modules
are now installed in $PREFIX/lib. In ActivePerl build 817 and
earlier, these were installed in $PREFIX/site/lib.
The $Config{siteprefix} is now $PREFIX/site. In ActivePerl build
817 and earlier, it was just $PREFIX and $Config{sitelib}
compensated by introducing the site level. As a consequence
programs included with packages installed into the site area now
get installed in $PREFIX/site/bin. In ActivePerl build 817 and
earlier, these were installed in $PREFIX/bin. Another consequence of
the $Config{siteprefix} update is that modules configured and built
with perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=... are now installed directly in the
lib directory of the given PREFIX.
PPM version 4 differs from version 3 (distributed with ActivePerl build
817 and earlier) in the following ways:
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Running ppm without arguments now bring up a graphical user interface;
there is a separate program called ppm-shell that gives you an interface
similar to the old console shell.
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The output format of most commands have changed. Scripts that parse
the output of ppm need to change.
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ppm describe only takes a number as argument. The other forms
are not supported.
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ppm install without argument does not install a default package and
does not support the range argument. The --follow and
--no-follow options are not supported.
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ppm profile, ppm properties, ppm set, and ppm target
commands are not supported.
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ppm repo up and ppm repo down commands are not supported.
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ppm search does not support the field=glob syntax.
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SOAP-based repositories are no longer supported.
There are some known outstanding issues with the PPM 4 client:
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The PPM state database (containing configuration information for
repositories, view options in the GUI, and repository state) is not
imported from previous installations.
If you have added custom PPM 4 repositories with ActivePerl 5.8.8.819,
you should reconfigure them manually with ppm repo add ... or in the
GUI. The repository state will be automatically re-synchronized when
PPM is run.
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Post install scripts for packages installed from the GUI will not be able to
receive non-default answers for any prompts it might produce. Packages that
need non-default answers must be installed with the command line version
of ppm.
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List icons will sometimes not repaint properly after scrolling under
X11. This does not affect the Windows and Mac OS X builds.
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Running sudo ppm ... the first time ppm is invoked from a
regular user account on Unix will create a root owned state
database. This effectively makes the database read-only when running
ppm without sudo, and might manifest itself as Application Error
dialogs when running the GUI. Workaround is to run sudo chown -R
$USER ~/.ActivePerl once to fix up ownership of the state database.
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Sync of repository state might be slow. (#45830)
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No PPM GUI for the 64 bit versions of ActivePerl.
The following issues are know to exists when installing ActivePerl on AIX:
The following issues are know to exists when installing ActivePerl on Unix:
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Some versions of tar on Solaris have bugs that prevent proper extraction
of files in a package that has long path names. Most other versions
of tar on Solaris use a different method than GNU tar to encode pathnames
longer than 100 characters. GNU tar is therefore required to extract the
package into the file system correctly. A precompiled version of GNU tar
for the sparc platform is available from:
http://www.sunfreeware.com/
You can also get the source package for GNU tar from:
http://www.gnu.org/
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The suidperl executable is not included in this package due to potential
security issues. If you wish to use suidperl in your installation, we
recommend building Perl from source. The source code for ActivePerl is
available at:
http://www.ActiveState.com
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Perl library paths, and thus PPM Areas, defined in the shell by the
PERL5LIB environment variable are not available to PPM when it is
launched by clicking the PPM icon in OS X. To to make this variable
available in the OS X GUI, add an entry similar to the following to
~/.MacOSX/environment.plist:
<key>PERL5LIB</key>
<string>/path/to/perl/lib</string>
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Running sudo ppm or sudo ppm gui does not start up the GUI with
root privileges. Use ppm as a command line tool with sudo.
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On version 10.3 or earlier, running ppm without arguments from a
remote console (e.g. via ssh) causes a core dump as it attempts to
launch the PPM GUI instead of providing an informative "ppm gui failed"
error.
The following issues are know to exists when installing ActivePerl on Windows:
The Perl distribution comes with extensive documentation. On Unix platforms,
all the standard documentation is installed as man pages under the Perl
install location. The location of the man pages may need to be added to the
MANPATH environment variable in order to access them. For example, in
the C shell:
% setenv MANPATH /opt/ActivePerl-5.8/man:$MANPATH
The documentation is installed in HTML format on all platforms. If ActivePerl
was installed in /opt/ActivePerl-5.8 then the HTML documentation
would be located in /opt/ActivePerl-5.8/html.
On Windows, the standard documentation along with Windows-specific Perl
documentation is installed in HTML format, and is accessible from the
"Start" menu.
Updated versions of the HTML documentation will always be available at
the ActiveState website:
http://www.ActiveState.com/ActivePerl/
Please report any problems you encounter with this release at the
following location:
http://bugs.ActiveState.com/ActivePerl/
If you do not have web access, reports can be also sent via email to
ActivePerl-Bugs@ActiveState.com. Please be sure to include detailed
information about the platform in your message.
As far as possible, please ensure that there is enough information in
the report to reproduce the bug elsewhere. It also helps to submit a
minimal test case that exhibits the bug.
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