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:

• Package declarations can now include a version number. 
• suidperl is no longer available as part of perl. If your code depends on suidperl, you need to find an alternate solution. (This was actually true as of 5.11.0)
• Over the years a number of language constructs and interpreter features have been deprecated and will eventually be removed. As of this release, Perl enables deprecation warnings by default.
• Perl's tests are now aware of (and work around) a bug in Mac OS X 10.6 locales.
• Support for Windows 95, 98, ME and NT4 has officially ended. 

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.

Perl 5.11.0

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.