ActivePerl 5.6 Change Log
    For the latest information on ActivePerl, please see:

        http://www.ActiveState.com/ActivePerl/

  Build 638 Thursday, Apr 15, 2004
    *PPM2 and PPM3*

    PPM3 has not been updated to the latest version PPM 3.1 as shipped
    with the ActivePerl 5.8 series. PPM 3.1 assumes that PPM 2.x is no
    longer installed and doesn't synchronize package information with it.
    Since PPM2 is the default PPM version in ActivePerl 5.6, PPM3 has been
    kept at version 3.0.

    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  On Windows, a potential buffer overrun in the stat() function has
       been fixed.

    *  On Windows, a handle leak in kill() has been fixed.

    *  On Windows, a memory leak in fork() has been fixed.

    *  On Windows NT and later, subprocesses are now started via "cmd
       /x/d/c" instead of "cmd /x/c". This disables execution of AutoRun
       command specified in the registry.

    *  On Windows, the four-argument form of select() did not report the
       $! (errno) value properly after errors. This has been corrected.

    *  Win32::GetOSVersion() returns additional information about the
       system (when available, Windows NT SP6 and later).

    *  Perl for ISAPI would sometimes close a filehandle twice. This leads
       to a race condition where another thread could have reused the
       filehandle before the second close would be executed. This usually
       happens in high load scenarios. Typical symptoms include error
       messages that Perl could not load standard modules, even though
       they are installed on the server.

       Perl for ISAPI no longer closes filehandles implicitly and relies
       now on the application to properly clean up file and socket handle
       resources.

    *  Perl for ISAPI now avoids closing the special handles STDIN, STDOUT
       and STDERR, even if the script asked for that explicitly.

    *  The following bundled modules have been updated to their latest
       versions:

         Archive-Tar
         Compress-Zlib
         Digest
         Digest-MD2
         Digest-MD5
         Digest-SHA1
         File-CounterFile
         HTML-Parser
         HTML-Tree
         libnet
         libwin32
         libwww-perl
         MD5
         MIME-Base64
         Storable
         Test-Harness
         URI

       The following modules have been added to ActivePerl:

         Data-Dump
         IO-Zlib
         Test-Simple

    *  Other minor bug fixes and documentation updates.

  Build 635 Thursday, Feb 6, 2003
    *Fixes for Security Issues*

    *  On Linux, the crypt() builtin did not return consistent results.
       This has been corrected.

    *  The reval() and rdo() methods in the Safe module could be subverted
       into executing unsafe code by the callee. This problem has been
       corrected.

    *Other Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  Overloading "bool" could result in core dumps in some situations.
       This has been corrected.

    *  On Windows, sockets opened by code running under PerlScript and
       Perl for ISAPI were not fully closed internally. The ensuing leak
       resulted in failure to open files or sockets after a certain number
       of sockets had been opened and closed under these environments.
       This problem was particularly severe when running under ActivePerl
       5.6.1.632 or 5.6.1.633, and is now fixed.

    *  On Windows, PerlScript and Perl for ISAPI were affected by a
       reentrancy problem, which meant that recursive invocation of these
       two engines could fail. This problem has been corrected.

    *  PPM3 includes a number of bug fixes for better handling of both
       PPM2 and PPM3 repositories.

    *  Tk and libwww-perl have been updated to their latest versions.

    *  Win32::EventLog could fail to retrieve messages under some
       circumstances. This has been corrected.

    *  Win32::OLE has been updated. Run "perldoc Win32::OLE::NEWS" for a
       summary.

    *  Win32::Shortcut no longer calls CoUninitialize() within an END
       block. This avoids random coredumps from this module when its
       DESTROY methods happen to get called after the END block executes.

    *  Win32::Job now propagates environment changes to its subprocesses
       correctly.

    *  A Win32::GetFolderPath() builtin is now supported. Run "perldoc
       Win32" for documentation on this new builtin.

    *  PPM v2 and v3 can now optionally generate HTML documentation when
       installing packages if POD documentation is found in the package.
       This is controlled by the rebuildhtml option in PPM v2 and the
       rebuild-html option in PPM v3.

    *  Other minor bug fixes and documentation updates.

    *  Build 634 was not formally released to the public.

  Build 633 Monday, June 17, 2002
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  The PPM3 release included in Build 632 had a bug in the package
       upgrade functionality. This has been corrected in PPM v3.0.1.

    *  Some modules that autoloaded their constants could reset $! during
       autoloading. Such locations now properly localize $! before
       potentially modifying it.

    *  IO::Pipe now works on Windows.

    *  libwin32 v0.191 is included on Windows.

  Build 632 Monday, June 3, 2002
    *Fixes for Security Issues*

    *  Compress-Zlib is now linked with zlib v1.1.4, which fixes a buffer
       overflow vulnerability in this library.

    *  The version of SOAP-Lite included in ActivePerl 5.6.1.631 and
       earlier allowed untrusted data to call any subroutine that is
       defined in the program that loads SOAP::Lite, or in any modules
       used by the program. SOAP-Lite v0.55, included in this release of
       ActivePerl, contains a fix for this issue.

    *Other Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  Redirecting STD* handles with "open(STDOUT, ""&=FOO")> leaked
       memory on all platforms. This leak has been fixed.

    *  Race conditions involving backticks, piped open() have been fixed.
       These problems could affect environments where multiple Perl
       interpreters execute in concurrent threads.

    *  Use of the range operator on constant numbers, as for example
       1..20, could result in compile-time stricture checks being disabled
       for parts of the program. The problem has been corrected.

    *  XSUBs can now be undefined using undef().

    *  On Unix platforms, %ENV and %SIG handling could result in race
       conditions. Changes to %ENV and %SIG are now only propagated to the
       underlying system process context within the top level interpreter.

    *  On Unix platforms, ActivePerl now uses reentrant versions of
       library functions, where available. This further improves
       thread-safety in multiple-interpreter environments.

    *  Win32::GetLongPathName() did not work correctly if there were "."
       or ".." components in the argument. The implementation has been
       improved to handle this better.

    *  On Windows platforms, a Win32::SetChildShowWindow() builtin is now
       supported. This can be used to set the visibility of child process
       windows. See Win32 for more information.

    *  Newer versions of the following modules are included: Digest-MD5,
       MIME-Base64, URI, HTML-Parser, libwww-perl, SOAP-Lite, and libnet.

    *  libwin32 has been updated on Windows platforms. There is support
       for job objects (available in Windows 2000 and XP) through the new
       Win32::Job extension, which can be used to manage a group of
       processes.

    *  On Windows platforms, the installer ensures that the Microsoft
       Installer automatic repair "feature" will not be triggered. This
       ensures that the repair "feature" does not corrupt the ActivePerl
       installation by "repairing" critical files to their unrelocated
       state.

    *  Documentation for perl programs is now included in the table of
       contents.

  Build 631 Monday, December 31, 2001
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  ActivePerl 5.6.1.628 introduced a memory leak in "eval "...""
       expressions that create anonymous subroutines. This has been fixed.

    *  On Windows, the behavior of system(@list) has been further
       rationalized to improve compatibility with the behavior before
       5.6.1.630. Automatic quoting of arguments with whitespace is now
       skipped if the argument already contains double quotes anywhere
       within it. Previously, the double quotes needed to be at both ends
       in order for further quoting to be skipped.

    *  Bugs in command.com on Windows 9x/Me prevented the system()
       enhancements in ActivePerl 5.6.1.630 from working in some
       situations. These enhancements are now disabled under Windows
       9x/Me.

    *  Perl for ISAPI and PerlScript had a bug in ActivePerl 5.6.1.630
       that caused system() and backticks to leak handles, resulting in
       failure of these functions after a certain number of invocations.
       This has been corrected.

    *  ActivePerl 5.6.1.629 and later had a problem in Perl for ISAPI that
       caused %ENV modifications done by the script to affect the real
       environment, resulting in incompatible behavior of scripts that
       assumed the older behavior. The behavior before 5.6.1.629 has been
       reinstated.

    *  On Windows, the internal memory allocator used by Perl could fail
       after around 1 GB of allocations even though more memory may be
       available on the system. Allocating up to and beyond 2GB is now
       possible if the system has memory available and allows a single
       process to allocate that amount of memory. Note that most Windows
       systems running on x86 have a 2GB limit on allocations by a single
       process.

    *  Non-blocking waitpid() on any process (a.k.a. waitpid(-1, WNOHANG))
       is now supported on Windows.

    *  Due to popular demand, the following modules are now included by
       default: Storable, Tk, and XML-Simple.

    *  PPM v3 beta 3 is included. A number of bugs in beta 2 have been
       fixed. Installing from URLs (http, ftp, and file) and installing
       through a HTTP proxy server are now supported.

    *  Compress-Zlib and MIME-Base64 have been updated to their latest
       versions.

    *  Due to popular demand, HTML documentation has been reintroduced
       into the default installation for Windows.

    *  Various other minor bugs have been fixed. See the ActivePerl bug
       database at http://bugs.ActiveState.com/ for more information.

  Build 630 Wednesday, October 30, 2001
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  PPM v3 beta 2 is included. This version of PPM is a complete
       rewrite, and comes with many new features and improvements,
       including support for managing installation profiles through the
       ASPN web site.

    *  Many of the standard extensions supplied with Perl have been
       audited for the use of C "static" variables and fixed to avoid such
       uses, making these extensions safe to use in multi-threaded
       environments such as PerlEx and PerlMx Enterprise. The list
       includes B, DynaLoader, File::Glob, DB_File, Opcode, and re.

    *  The readline() (aka "diamond") operator now works on "our"
       variables.

    *  On Windows, system() and backticks behave more sanely with respect
       to whitespace in arguments. Any whitespace inside quoted arguments
       are correctly preserved. system() with multiple arguments also
       automatically quotes any arguments that contain whitespace by
       enclosing them in double-quotes, as necessary. This improves
       portability of the standard idiom of calling system() with multiple
       arguments.

    *  On Windows, IO::File::new_tmpfile() does not fail after 32767 calls

    *  On Windows, entries in %ENV were sometimes being improperly
       propagated to child processes if such entries happened to be at the
       end of the internal process environment table. This misbehavior has
       been corrected.

    *  PerlScript and Perl for ISAPI ignore the \\?\ prefix in new-fangled
       file names returned by IIS in Windows XP.

    *  In scripts running under PerlScript or Perl for ISAPI, print() with
       more than one argument did not print the second and subsequent
       arguments. This has been fixed.

    *  The style and content of the included online documentation has been
       extensively revised. On Windows, all the documentation is now
       provided in fully searchable HTML Help format. Documentation in
       conventional HTML format continues to be included only for Unix
       platforms, and can also be downloaded separately.

    *  Some of the bundled modules have been updated to their latest
       available versions: libwin32 v0.18, URI v1.17, and SOAP-Lite v0.51
       are now included.

  Build 629 Thursday, August 23, 2001
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  Perl now uses the reentrant versions of time functions
       localtime_r(), gmtime_r(), and asctime_r() on Unix platforms,
       making the corresponding builtins and POSIX::asctime() thread-safe.

    *  On Windows, child processes launched with Win32::Spawn() now
       correctly inherit any modifications to %ENV done by the script.

    *  On Windows, modifications to $ENV{PATH} in the script correctly
       affect the lookup of executables in system() and backticks.
       Previous versions did not propagate %ENV modifications completely
       enough for the underlying CreateProcess() system call to notice any
       changes.

    *  A small number of minor bug fixes from the Perl development track
       have been incorporated. See the ActivePerl source code diff for the
       complete list.

    *  Compress-Zlib has been updated to v1.13.

    *  libwin32 v0.173 is included.

  Build 628 Thursday, July 5, 2001
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  A few bug fixes from the Perl development track have been
       incorporated. See the ActivePerl source code diff for the complete
       list.

    *  ActivePerl on Solaris does not use Perl's malloc by default.
       Sufficient compatibility stubs are included such that binary
       compatibility with previous builds will not be affected.

    *  HTML-Parser has been updated to v3.25.

    *  The included HTML documentation has many substantive and cosmetic
       improvements.

    *  Build 627 was not formally released to the public.

  Build 626 Thursday, May 1, 2001
    Build 626 is based on Perl 5.6.1. This is the first release of
    ActivePerl based on this new maintenance release of Perl. This release
    is meant for use in production systems. However, owing to the sheer
    volume of changes between Perl 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 that have been
    incorporated, please be sure to test it thoroughly in a non-critical
    environment before you upgrade your production systems.

    Please check perl561delta for a list of the major changes in Perl.
    Only additional changes specific to ActivePerl are mentioned here.

    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  Perl 5.6.1 has been incorporated. See perl561delta for a list of
       changes.

    *  The Solaris pkgadd and Red Hat RPM packages are now relocatable.
       See the release notes for how to install them to a location other
       than the default one.

    *  The following new modules have been included: HTML-Tagset v3.03

    *  The following modules have been updated to newer versions:
       SOAP-Lite, HTML-Parser v3.19, HTML-Tree v3.11, URI v1.11,
       libwww-perl v5.51.

       For additional information on module updates in Perl 5.6.1, see
       perl561delta.

    *  A number of fixes to PPM have been included. PPM now displays a
       download status indicator, and sports a "getconfig" command.

    *  A large number of documentation updates are included.

  Build 623 Sunday, December 12, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  *Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me Installation*

       Installer now adds Perl/bin directory to the PATH environment
       variable for Windows 9x. Windows 9x will need to be rebooted for
       this to take effect.

       The PATH settings are not removed after an uninstallation.

    *  PPM updated to 2.1.2. It now uses SOAP-Lite and has drastically
       reduced bandwidth requirements for SUMMARY requests. This is a
       prerequisite for supporting the new PPM repository containing most
       of CPAN.

    *  OLE Browser has been fixed to work on IE 5.5.

    *  minor bug fixes to fork() emulation and duplication of socket
       handles on Windows 9X.

  Build 622 Sunday, November 5, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  Custom build for ActivePerl CDROM

    *  MSI installer addes the CDROM repository to the ppm.xml file
       (Windows only)

  Build 620 Sunday, October 29, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  bug fixes in environment setup for backticks and system()

    *PerlScript*

    *  works now with IIS5. Previously ASP would sometimes return an empty
       page when the page was accessed simultaneously from multiple
       clients.

    *  supports OLE objects as parameters (VT_DISPATCH)

    *  various namespace / package setup problems fixed

    *  STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR are now available when run under WSH

    *  JScript and VBScript functions can be called directly (on ASP
       pages)

    *Documentation*

    *  Commandline parameters for MSI installer documented (installation
       notes)

    *  Win32 builtin documentation moved from Pod to Modules

    *Modules*

    *  CGI.pm updated to 2.74

    *  Win32API::Net updated to version 0.09

  Build 618 Tuesday, September 12, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  Bug fixes imported from the Perl development track. See the
       following file for the detailed log:

           http://www.ActiveState.com/download/ActivePerl/src/5.6/AP618_diff.txt

       Individual patches for each of these changes may also be obtained.
       See perlhack.

    *  Perl's "newSVrv()" API function could result in corrupt data when
       coercing an already initialized value to the right type, and could
       also lead to memory leaks. Win32::OLE v0.14 tickled these bugs.
       "newSVrv()" has been fixed to resolve these issues.

    *  Perl's optimizer could coredump on stacked assignments involving
       "split()", such as "@a = @b = split(...)". This is now fixed.

    *  Windows sockets weren't being initialized correctly in child
       threads if the parent already initialized it. This resulted in
       "print()" on a socket created under such conditions not being
       handled correctly (whereas "send()" would do the right thing). The
       problem has been fixed.

    *  Win32::OLE v0.14 had a bug that could cause strings longer than 256
       characters to be truncated by a single character. This has been
       corrected.

  Build 617 Thursday, August 31, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  Bug fixes imported from the Perl development track. See the
       following file for the detailed log:

           http://www.ActiveState.com/download/ActivePerl/src/5.6/AP617_diff.txt

       Individual patches for each of these changes may also be obtained.
       See perlhack.

    *  Problems with backticks not returning a proper return code under
       Windows 9x have been fixed. Linux, Solaris and Windows NT/2000
       weren't affected.

    *  "wait()" and "waitpid()" now return the correct pid values for
       pseudo-pids on Windows.

    *  New entries added to the end of the environment via %ENV did not
       get inherited by child processes on Windows. This has been
       corrected.

    *  Build 616 introduced a change that could make "close(SOCKET)"
       return a bogus return value. This has been corrected.

    *  Various minor PerlScript incompatibilities under Internet Explorer
       5.5 on Windows have been corrected.

    *  Perl for ISAPI and PerlScript do not add entries to the EventLog by
       default.

    *  libnet v1.06 is now included with ActivePerl. To configure the
       site-specific defaults for libnet, run
       "$Config{installprefix}/bin/libnetcfg.pl".

    *  Digest-MD5 v2.11 is now included with ActivePerl.

    *  Several bundled extensions have been upgraded to newer versions.
       URI v1.09, libwww-perl v5.48, Compress-Zlib v1.08 and libwin32
       v0.17 are now included.

    *  The included HTML documentation has been improved and updated to be
       current with the latest modules.

    *  The HtmlHelp.pm module is no longer included with ActivePerl. If
       you want this module, please obtain it from a release prior to
       ActivePerl 617.

  Build 616 Friday, July 14, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  Bug fixes imported from the Perl development track. See the
       following file for the detailed log:

           http://www.ActiveState.com/download/ActivePerl/src/5.6/AP616_diff.txt

       Individual patches for each of these changes may also be obtained.
       See perlhack.

    *  A bug in Win32::OLE that prevented PerlScript from working properly
       has been fixed.

    *  On Windows, a small memory leak in the accept() builtin function
       has been fixed.

    *  On Windows, creating sockets in pseudo-child processes did not work
       because Winsock was not initialized in the pseudo-process. This has
       been rectified.

  Build 615 Thursday, June 29, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  Bug fixes imported from the Perl development track. See the
       following file for the detailed log:

           http://www.ActiveState.com/download/ActivePerl/src/5.6/AP615_diff.txt

       Individual patches for each of these changes may also be obtained.
       See perlhack.

    *  On Unix platforms, ActivePerl is now built with the "-Duseithreads"
       Configure option, just as on Windows. While this provides a
       functionally identical perl, it also makes this build binary
       incompatible with earlier builds on Unix platforms. If you had
       installed any extensions (i.e. modules with XS code) using earlier
       builds via PPM or otherwise, you will need to reinstall them under
       this build. Future builds will maintain binary compatibility with
       this one.

       On Windows, this build continues to be binary compatible with build
       613.

    *  The installation location for the native installations on Unix (Red
       Hat RPM, Debian dpkg, or Solaris pkgadd) have changed. These
       packages will now be installed under /usr/local/ActivePerl-5.6/
       rather than under /usr/local/perl-5.6. This one-time change avoids
       confusion with locally installed versions built from the sources,
       and also avoids installing on top of existing binary-incompatible
       build 613 installations.

       The installation location can be chosen as usual on Windows, and
       when installing using the generic installers on Unix.

    *  On Windows, chdir() could sometimes fail to return failure when
       given a non-existent directory, and UNC paths didn't work
       correctly. These problems have been corrected.

    *  The "libwin32" v0.16 release from CPAN is included for the Windows
       builds.

    *  Various small PPM bugs have been fixed.

    *  A bug in PerlScript that prevented it from working under IIS5 on
       Windows 2000 has been fixed.

  Build 613 Thursday, March 23, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  This build corresponds to the Perl 5.6.0 source code release.

    *  This package contains some files that were missing in build 612.

  Build 612 Wednesday, March 22, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  This build corresponds to the Perl 5.6.0 source code release.

    *  This build incorporates mostly minor bug fixes between 5.6.0
       release candidate 2 and the final 5.6.0 source code release. See
       perl56delta for a detailed summary of changes between 5.005 and
       5.6.0.

  Build 611 Wednesday, March 15, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  This build corresponds to the Perl 5.6.0 release candidate 2
       sources.

    *  binmode() now supports a second optional argument that can be used
       to switch a file handle to ":crlf" or ":raw" mode. (These
       correspond to the traditional text and binary modes.) See "binmode"
       in perlfunc.

    *  The new "open" pragma can be used to set the default mode for
       implicitly opened handles in the current lexical scope. This is
       useful to set a particular mode for the results of the qx//
       operator. See open.

    *  The bundled ActivePerl documentation has been reorganized. Outdated
       material has either been reworked to reflect the current status, or
       removed when it was no longer applicable.

    *  Many bugs in the beta releases have been fixed.

  Build 609 Wednesday, March 1, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  This build corresponds to the public Perl 5.6 beta 3 release,
       otherwise known as v5.5.670.

    *  The Windows version of the installer now supports installing into
       paths that contain spaces.

    *  Linux and Solaris install packages that allow non-privileged users
       to install anywhere are supported. The system-specific packaging
       formats that typically require root privileges continue to be
       available.

    *  Support for kill(0,$pid) on Windows to test if process exists.

    *  There is a new tutorial on Object Oriented Perl for beginners. See
       `perlboot'.

    *  The PPM repository has been updated with newer versions of modules
       for all supported platforms.

  Build 607 Friday, February 11, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  This build corresponds to the public Perl 5.6 beta 1 release,
       otherwise known as v5.5.650.

    *  Several bugs in the Unicode support have been fixed.

    *  Support for Unicode has changed from previous development versions.
       See perlunicode for details.

    *  There is a new -C command-line switch to request that system calls
       use the wide-character APIs. This can also be used in the shebang
       line.

    *  The byte pragma can be used to force byte-semantics on Perl
       operations. When not used, character semantics apply if the data is
       Unicode; otherwise, byte semantics are used.

  Build 606 Friday, February 4, 2000
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  PPM can communicate with the package repository via SOAP. Currently
       PPM's and SOAP's integration is somewhat limited; however, it
       serves as proof of concept.

    *  New modules included with the distribution are:

                - SOAP
                - File::CounterFile
                - Font::AFM

    *  Support for Unicode has changed from previous versions. See
       perlunicode for details.

  Build 604 Friday, November 26, 1999
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  A few bugs in the fork() emulation have been fixed. perlfork
       reflects these changes.

  Build 603 Tuesday, November 23, 1999
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  NOTE:Build 603 is not binary compatible with earlier builds. If you
       have compiled your own extensions with earlier builds, you will
       need to recompile all of them.

    *  Build 603 corresponds to Perl 5.005_62. Additional patches
       available since 5.005_62 in the public Perl repository have been
       incorporated.

    *  Preliminary support for fork() is included. See perlfork for
       details about this functionality.

    *  Documentation in fully searchable HTMLHelp format is included.

    *  Many of the included extensions from CPAN have been updated to
       newer versions.

    *  A large number of minor bugs in the Perl core have been fixed. See
       the Changes file in the included sources for a detailed list.

  Build 602 Thursday, August 5, 1999
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  Build 602 corresponds to Perl 5.005_60. Additional patches
       available since 5.005_60 in the public Perl repository have been
       incorporated.

    *  A number of pre-built extensions from CPAN are included in this
       release. These may be installed using PPM or VPM (both of which are
       included).

  Build 601 Tuesday, July 13, 1999
    *Bug Fixes and Changes*

    *  Build 601 corresponds to Perl 5.005_57. Additional patches
       available since 5.005_57 in the public Perl repository have been
       incorporated.

    *  This build features a major reworking of the API exposed by the
       PERL_OBJECT build option. The result is a well-defined Perl API
       (restricted to C syntax) that provides very high degree of
       compatibility for extensions available from CPAN.

    *  Perl for ISAPI, PerlScript, PerlEz and PerlMsg have been modified
       to use the new PERL_OBJECT API.

    *  Visual Package Manager (VPM) is now available. VPM can be used to
       install pre-built binaries from a package repository. One such is
       available at http://www.activestate.com/packages/perl5_6/.

  What's new in the 600 Series
    *Major Changes*

    *  This series is built around development versions of Perl 5.006.
       Build 600 corresponds to Perl 5.005_57.

    *  Significant changes that have occurred in the 5.006 development
       track are documented in perldelta.

    *  Build 600 includes additional changes for supporting globalization.
       All Win32 API calls made by Perl now follow the utf8 mode of the
       interpreter. Wide versions of the API calls are made when utf8 is
       in effect. See utf8 for more information on enabling support for
       Unicode.

    *  The 600 series is not binary compatible with builds in the 500
       series. Any extensions built using binaries from the ActivePerl 500
       series will need to be recompiled. Note especially that this
       applies to PPDs that may have been built for 500 series builds.

