Draft 1 of perl585delta.

p4raw-id: //depot/maint-5.8/perl@23005

1 files changed, 175 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/pod/perl585delta.pod b/pod/perl585delta.pod
index c33d732f6b..3d3cde736d 100644
--- a/pod/perl585delta.pod
+++ b/pod/perl585delta.pod
@@ -13,13 +13,94 @@ There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4.
 
 =head1 Core Enhancements
 
+Perl's regular expression engine now contains support for matching on the
+intersection of two Unicode character classes. You can also now refer to
+user defined character classes from within other user defined character
+classes.
+
 =head1 Modules and Pragmata
 
 FIXME test 12 in ext/List/Util/t/lln.t at RC1 time
 
+=over 4
+
+=item *
+
+Carp improved to work nicely with Safe. Carp's message reporting should now
+be anomaly free - it will always print out line number information.
+
+=item *
+
+CGI upgraded to version 3.05
+
+=item *
+
+charnames now avoids clobbering $_
+
+=item *
+
+Digest upgraded to version 1.08
+
+=item *
+
+Encode upgraded to version 2.01
+
+=item *
+
+FileCache
+
+=item *
+
+Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28
+
+=item *
+
+Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13
+
+=item *
+
+Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57
+
+=item *
+
+Safe now works properly with Carp
+
+FIXME $VERSION
+
+=item *
+
+Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14
+
+=item *
+
+Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its historical partial
+auto-quoting of command arguments can now be disabled.
+
+=item *
+
+Test upgraded to version 1.25
+
+=item *
+
+Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42
+
+=item *
+
+Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10
+
+=item *
+
+Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40
+
+=back
+
 =head1 Utility Changes
 
-=head2 h2ph enhancements
+=head2 Perl's debugger
+
+The debugger can now step backwards.
+
+=head2 h2ph
 
 F<h2ph> is now able to understand a very limited set of C inline functions
 -- basically, the inline functions that look like CPP macros. This has
@@ -33,12 +114,105 @@ documentation, I<you may need to dicker with the files produced>.
 
 =head1 Installation and Configuration Improvements
 
+Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.
+
 =head1 Selected Bug Fixes
 
+=over 4
+
+=item *
+
+The in place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a bug. For example,
+in code such as
+
+    @a = sort ($b, @a)
+
+the result would omit the value $b. This is now fixed.
+
+=item *
+
+The unnecessary assignment optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 could give spurious
+warnings. This has been fixed.
+
+=item *
+
+Perl should now correctly detect and read BOM-marked and (BOMless) UTF-16
+scripts.
+
+=item *
+
+Creating a new thread when weak references exist was buggy, and would often
+cause warnings at interpreter destruction time. The known bug is now fixed.
+
+=item *
+
+Several obscure bugs involving manipulating utf8 strings with C<substr> have
+been fixed.
+
+=item *
+
+Previously if Perl's file globbing function encountered a directory that it
+did not have permission to open it would return immediately, leading to
+unexpected truncation of the list of results. This has been fixed, to be
+consistent with Unix shells' globbing behaviour.
+
+=item *
+
+Thread creation time could vary wildly between identical runs. This was caused
+by poor hashing algorithm in the thread cloning routines, which has now been
+fixed.
+
+=back
+
 =head1 New or Changed Diagnostics
 
+=over 4
+
+=item *
+
+Perl -V has several improvements
+
+=over 4
+
+=item  *
+
+correctly outputs local patch names that contain embedded code snippets
+or other characters that used to confuse it.
+
+=item * 
+
+arguments to -V that look like regexps will give multiple lines of output.
+
+=item *
+
+a trailing colon suppresses the linefeed and ';'  terminator, allowing
+embedding of queries into shell commands.
+
+=item *
+
+a leading colon removes the 'name=' part of the response, allowing mapping to
+any name.
+
+=back
+
+=item *
+
+When perl fails to find the specified script, it now outputs a second line
+suggesting that the user use the C<-S> flag:
+
+    $ perl5.8.5 missing.pl
+    Can't open perl script "missing.pl": No such file or directory.
+    Use -S to search $PATH for it.
+
+=back
+
 =head1 Changed Internals
 
+The Unicode character class files used by the regular expression engine are
+now built at build time from the supplied Unicode consortium data files,
+instead of being shipped prebuilt. This makes the compressed Perl source
+tarball about 200K smaller.
+
 =head1 New Tests
 
 =head1 Known Problems