I played hooky from work for a few days last week to help get Perl 5.11.0 released. I did a little bit of cat-herding, a few hours of copy-editing and some test building. The end result was that we now have an unstable ("blead") release of the next major version of Perl and a plan to keep making them happen.
Whispers of an "evil power" were heard in lines at dairy shops, in streetcars, stores, arguments, kitchens, suburban and long-distance trains, at stations large and small, in dachas and on beaches. Needless to say, truly mature and cultured people did not tell these stories about an evil power's visit to the capital. In fact, they even made fun of them and tried to talk sense into those who told them. Nevertheless, facts are facts, as they say, and cannot simply be dismissed without explanation: somebody had visited the capital. The charred cinders of Griboyedov alone, and many other things besides, confirmed it. Cultured people shared the point of view of the investigating team: it was the work of a gang of hypnotists and ventriloquists magnificently skilled in their art.
- M. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.0.
Perl 5.11.0 is a DEVELOPMENT release. We're making it available to you today to make it easy for you to test your software on what will eventually become Perl 5.12.
This release is the result of over two years of development by a global community of developers. You can find a list of high-profile changes in this release in the file "perl5110delta.pod" inside the release.
You can download the 5.11.0 tarball from: http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.11.0/
The release's SHA1 signatures are:
0d436577386c668161e3dad385d233c383bf4c9d perl-5.11.0.tar.bz2
3137486cfe00094d1cd9a00e6e61f152f8fdb26e perl-5.11.0.tar.gz
We welcome your feedback on this release. If you discover issues with Perl 5.11.0, please use the 'perlbug' tool included in this distribution to report them. If Perl 5.11.0 works well for you, please use the 'perlthanks' tool included with this distribution to tell the all-volunteer development team how much you appreciate their work.
If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test your software against development releases. While we strive to maintain source compatibility with prior releases wherever possible, it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected consequences. If you spot a change in a development release which breaks your code, it's much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the next stable release. If you only test your code against stable releases of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change which breaks your code.
Today marks a major change in how we'll be releasing development versions of Perl.
Historically, a single individual, the Perl "pumpking" has been personally responsible for all aspects of the Perl development process - ranging from direction setting, dispute resolution and deep hacking to mentoring, patch application and release engineering.
Over the years, we've been blessed with a series of extraordinary leaders. These hackers have eschewed fame, fortune and many nights' sleep for the good of Perl.
To help ensure that we don't burn out our best diplomats and brightest coders, our release process is changing. I have recruited the first few volunteer release managers. Each month, on the 20th, the next release engineer in rotation will cut a new development release.
Today's release of 5.11.0 is a transitional release to test our release machinery and process. The schedule for the near future is as follows:
2009
====
October 2 - 5.11.0 - Jesse Vincent
October 20 - 5.11.1 - Jesse Vincent
November 20 - 5.11.2 - Yves Orton
December 20 - 5.11.3 - Leon Brocard
2010
====
January 20 - 5.11.4 - Ricardo Signes
If you're interested in volunteering to join the release-engineer rotation, please contact me off-list and I'll add you to our talent pool. It's not a particularly lucrative job - The only perks are your name in perlhist, the chance to choose the epigram for a release announcement and the warm feeling you get from bringing a new version of Perl into the world.
