Say -- I'm going in a swimming, I am. Don't you wish you could? But of course you'd druther work -- wouldn't you? Course you would!" Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said: "What do you call work?" "Why ain't that work?" Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly: "Well, maybe it is, and maybe it aint. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer." "Oh come, now, you don't mean to let on that you like it?" The brush continued to move. "Like it? Well I don't see why I oughtn't to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?" That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth—stepped back to note the effect -- added a touch here and there-criticised the effect again -- Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said: "Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little."

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.3.

This is the fourth DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.11.x series leading to a stable release of Perl 5.12.0. You can find a list of high-profile changes in this release in the file "perl5113delta.pod" inside the distribution.

Perl 5.11.3 is, hopefully, the last release of Perl 5.11.x before code freeze for Perl 5.12.0. At that point, we will only make changes which fix regressions from previous released versions of Perl or which resolve issues we believe would make a stable release of Perl 5.12.0 inadvisable.

You can (or will shortly be able to) download the 5.11.3 release from:

http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.11.3/

The release's SHA1 signatures are:
MD5: 0051020f8ae2a89c9d624e01ed56b02c perl-5.11.3.tar.bz2 SHA1: 7fe87005437002f0b515d983429d0bfba36398ac perl-5.11.3.tar.bz2

This release corresponds to commit 9c3f2640bc in Perl's git repository. It is tagged as 'v5.11.3'.

We welcome your feedback on this release. If you discover issues with Perl 5.11.3, please use the 'perlbug' tool included in this distribution to report them. If Perl 5.11.3 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 stable versions of Perl wherever possible, it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected consequences. If you spot a change in a development version 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.

Perl 5.11.3 represents approximately one month of development since Perl 5.11.2 and contains 61407 lines of changes across 396 files from 40 authors and committers:

Abigail, Alex Davies, Alexandr Ciornii, Andrew Rodland, Andy Dougherty, Bram, brian d foy, Chip Salzenberg, Chris Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel Frederick Crisman, David Golden, Dennis Kaarsemaker, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Gene Sullivan, Gerard Goossen, H. Merijn Brand, Hugo van der Sanden, Jan Dubois, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, Karl Williamson, Leon Brocard, Max Maischein, Michael Breen, Moritz Lenz, Nicholas Clark, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Stepan Kasal, Steve Hay, Steve Peters, Tim Bunce, Tony Cook, Vincent Pit and Zefram.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.

Notable changes in this release:

• Perl is shipped with Unicode version 5.2, itself released in October 2009.
• Perl can now handle every Unicode character property.
• The experimental 'legacy' pragma, introduced with Perl 5.11.2 has been removed. Its functionality has been replaced with the 'feature' pragma.
• Numerous CPAN "toolchain" modules have been updated to what we hope are the final release versions for Perl 5.12.0.
• Many crashing bugs or regressions from earlier releases of Perl were fixed for this release.

Development versions of Perl are released monthly on or about the 20th of the month by a monthly "release manager". You can expect following upcoming releases:

• January 20 - Ricardo Signes
• February 20 - Steve Hay
• March 20 - Ask Bjørn Hansen