Re: Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0?

From my own limited knowledge, I gather that 5.8.0 might break a few things involved with handling binary or "non-ascii" data content; some system setups with non-U.S./English locale settings may be especially prone to this trouble, because 5.8.0 would apparently use the locale info to "assume" that data files should be expected to contain unicode characters. (I believe this will be fixed in 5.8.1, so that no such assumption is made -- see this thread on the perl-unicode mailing list for details.)

A few recent SoPW posts have also come up involving the "re-interpretation" of non-ascii character data within perl scripts as "invalid utf8" byte sequences, but the workaround is easy ("no utf8").

Apart from these somewhat limited issues, I haven't run across any problems -- I've had 5.8.0 on my personal linux box for a few months now, with no problems. The PerlIO stuff is awesome, and I wouldn't want to go back.

Comment on Re: Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0?

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Re^2: Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0? by Coruscate (Sexton) on Feb 20, 2003 at 06:31 UTC
/me nods. In my case, I got into Redhat 8.0 for an operating system (yep, I did it and spent some time figuring out that /etc/sysconfig/i18n contained the nasty lines that (more or less?) enabled UTF-8 encoding system-wide). Man pages look funny and tossed up with UTF-8, and many perl modules complained. I no longer have any problems, now that I nullified the utf-8 language settings. :) If the above content is missing any vital points or you feel that any of the information is misleading, incorrect or irrelevant, please feel free to downvote the post. At the same time, reply to this node or /msg me to tell me what is wrong with the post, so that I may update the node to the best of my ability. If you do not inform me as to why the post deserved a downvote, your vote does not have any significance and will be disregarded.	[reply]

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Re^2: Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0?
by Coruscate (Sexton) on Feb 20, 2003 at 06:31 UTC

/me nods. In my case, I got into Redhat 8.0 for an operating system (yep, I did it and spent some time figuring out that /etc/sysconfig/i18n contained the nasty lines that (more or less?) enabled UTF-8 encoding system-wide). Man pages look funny and tossed up with UTF-8, and many perl modules complained. I no longer have any problems, now that I nullified the utf-8 language settings. :)

If the above content is missing any vital points or you feel that any of the information is misleading, incorrect or irrelevant, please feel free to downvote the post. At the same time, reply to this node or /msg me to tell me what is wrong with the post, so that I may update the node to the best of my ability. If you do not inform me as to why the post deserved a downvote, your vote does not have any significance and will be disregarded.

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