Massively Parallel Procrastination

Oops! I did it again - Perl 5.11.1

Milo had been caught red-handed in the act of plundering his countrymen, and, as a result, his stock had never been higher. He proved good as his word when a rawboned major from Minnesota curled his lip in rebellious disavowal and demanded his share of the syndicate Milo kept saying everybody owned. Milo met the challenge by writing the words "A Share" on the nearest scrap of paper and handing it away with a virtuous disdain that won the envy and admiration of almost everyone who knew him. His glory was at a peak, and Colonel Cathcart, who knew and admired his war record, was astonished by the deferential humility with which Milo presented himself at Group Headquarters and made his fantastic appeal for more hazardous assignment.


- Joseph Heller, Catch-22 

 

It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.1.

This is the second 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 "perl5111delta.pod" inside the distribution.

You can (or will shortly be able to) download the 5.11.1 release from:

http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.11.1/

The release's SHA1 signatures are:

4eb796d28849ea21466166cea0b580d98163564f  perl-5.11.1.tar.bz2

aa4ca3b0cffa1bbcbcdb09e81c6ece759112ce14  perl-5.11.1.tar.gz

We welcome your feedback on this release. If you discover issues with Perl 5.11.1, please use the 'perlbug' tool included in this distribution to report them. If Perl 5.11.1 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.

In the release announcement for 5.11.0, I asked readers to test the new version of Perl with their in-house applications and CPAN modules.  Among other things, that testing turned up previously undiscovered issues in a change to Perl's Regular Expression semantics which we were able to defang in time for 5.11.1.

\Notable changes in this release:

This release represents approximately 3 weeks development since Perl 5.11.0, containing 22,000 lines of changes across 396 files from 26 authors and committers:

Abigail, Alex Vandiver, brian d foy, Chris Williams, Craig A. Berry, David Fifield, David Golden, demerphq, Eric Brine, Geoffrey T. Dairiki, George Greer, H.Merijn Brand, Jan Dubois, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Josh ben Jore, Max Maischein, Nicholas Clark, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Simon Schubert, Sisyphus, Smylers, Steve Hay, Steve Peters, Vincent Pit and Yves Orton.

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.


Yves Orton will release Perl 5.11.2 on November 20, 2009.

Leon Brocard will release Perl 5.11.3 on December 20, 2009.

Ricardo Signes will release Perl 5.11.4 on January 20, 2010.