Perl 5.12.1

"Now suppose," chortled Dr. Breed, enjoying himself, "that there were many possible ways in which water could crystallize, could freeze. Suppose that the sort of ice we skate upon and put into highballs— what we might call ice-one—is only one of several types of ice. Suppose water always froze as ice-one on Earth because it had never had a seed to teach it how to form ice-two, ice-three, ice-four ... And suppose," he rapped on his desk with his old hand again, "that there were one form, which we will call ice-nine—a crystal as hard as this desk—with a melting point of, let us say, one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit, or, better still, a melting point of one-hundred- and-thirty degrees."

-- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

It gives me great pleasure to announce Perl 5.12.1, the second stable release of Perl 5.12.

You can download Perl 5.12.1 from your favorite CPAN mirror or from:

http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.12.1/

SHA1 digests for this release are:

    75a8a17cec15d68c6bb959b0aa9879d2ded6f90d  perl-5.12.1.tar.bz2
    83b99f08379782dc06594a85eeb279edc5b0ca44  perl-5.12.1.tar.gz

This release contains minor bug fixes and updates of several core modules, as well as minor documentation updates. It should be fully backward compatible with Perl 5.12.0.

Perl 5.12.1 is a recommended upgrade for all users of Perl 5.12.

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perl5121delta.pod" located in the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web at:

http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.12.1/pod/perl5121delta.pod

Perl 5.12.1 represents approximately four weeks of development since Perl 5.12.0 and contains approximately 4,000 lines of changes across 142 files from 28 authors.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.12.1:

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Chris Williams, chromatic, Craig A. Berry, David Golden, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Frank Wiegand, Gene Sullivan, Goro Fuji, H.Merijn Brand, James E Keenan, Jan Dubois, Jesse Vincent, Josh ben Jore, Karl Williamson, Leon Brocard, Michael Schwern, Nga Tang Chan, Nicholas Clark, Niko Tyni, Philippe Bruhat, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Ricardo Signes, Steffen Mueller, Todd Rinaldo, Vincent Pit and Zefram.

We expect to release Perl 5.12.2 in mid-August 2010, followed by Perl 5.12.3 in mid-November. The next major release of Perl 5, 5.14.0 should appear in spring 2011.