New Perl Releaase

5.8.4 is a maintenance release for perl 5.8, incorporating various minor bugfixes and optimisations. This release updates Perl to the Unicode Character Database, Version 4.0.1, and fixes some minor errors in Perl's UTF8 handling. It provides optimisations for Unicode case conversion functions, map and sort, and on most platforms now provides protection against memory wrapping attacks. Please see the perldelta for the full details.

Please report bugs using the perlbug utility. If the build or regression tests fail, make nok. If the build fails to early to run this, please mail perlbug at perl.org directly.

This is a source code release, not a binary release. You will need a C development environment to build the sources. Binary releases will be made available by various vendors.

5.8.5 is planed for release in July 2004, concentrating on bug fixing and stability, and will be followed by further 5.8.x releases.

To build and install Perl, and to find out how to report problems, please read the INSTALL file, and any relevant README.platform file.

As specified in the licenses for Perl (see the files named Artistic or Copying), THIS PACKAGE IS PROVIDED WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.

As always, you should conduct an appropriate level of testing before using any new product in your production environment.

The "perldelta", which describes the most important changes for this release is available in the source distribution, or at: