FWIW: In Perl 5.8.1 a nasty issue was fixed in perl 5.8.0 that was a thorn in my side, UTF-8. I upgraded to perl 5.8.4 (current) and I'm about to test fully before moving into production. Be sure the run perl -V to see all current options.
>From 5.8.1 PERL changes: UTF-8 no longer default under UTF-8 locales In Perl 5.8.0 many Unicode features were introduced. One of them was found to be of more nuisance than benefit: the automagic (and silent) "UTF-8-ification" of filehandles, including the standard filehandles, if the user's locale settings indicated use of UTF-8. For example, if you had en_US.UTF-8 as your locale, your STDIN and STDOUT were automatically "UTF-8", in other words an implicit binmode(..., ":utf8") was made. This meant that trying to print, say, chr(0xff), ended up printing the bytes 0xc3 0xbf. Hardly what you had in mind unless you were aware of this feature of Perl 5.8.0. The problem is that the vast majority of people weren't: for example in RedHat releases 8 and 9 the default locale setting is UTF-8, so all RedHat users got UTF-8 filehandles, whether they wanted it or not. The pain was intensified by the Unicode implementation of Perl 5.8.0 (still) having nasty bugs, especially related to the use of s/// and tr///. (Bugs that have been fixed in 5.8.1) Therefore a decision was made to backtrack the feature and change it from implicit silent default to explicit conscious option. The new Perl command line option -C and its counterpart environment variable PERL_UNICODE can now be used to control how Perl and Unicode interact at interfaces like I/O and for example the command line arguments. See "-C" in perlrun and "PERL_UNICODE" in perlrun for more information. <<Dan>> > -----Original Message----- > From: Kenneth Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2004 9:54 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Minimum Perl version for SA 3.0 > > I just attempted to install a preliminary Rawhide RPM for SA > 3.0-pre1 on Red Hat 8 and got this error: > > error: Failed dependencies: > perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.8.0) is needed by > spamassassin-3.0-2.pre1 > > The system has perl-5.8.0-88.3 installed. What's the minimum > version of Perl required for the new SA? > >
