They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
          In a Sieve they went to sea:
        In spite of all their friends could say,
        On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
          In a Sieve they went to sea!
        And when the Sieve turned round and round,
        And everyone cried, "You'll all be drowned!"
        They cried aloud, "Our Sieve ain't big,
          But we don't care a button, we don't care a fig!
            In a Sieve we'll go to sea!"

        Far and few, far and few,
          Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
        Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
          And they went to sea in a Sieve.

        (The Jumblies - Edward Lear)

Well, here is our very own sea-going sieve. :-)
Please test it thoroughly and find all the holes *before* we set sail.
Currently it's only at

    http://www.ccl4.org/~nick/P/perl-5.8.2-RC1.tar.bz2

(or s/bz2$/gz/ if you really want a 25% larger download.) Please don't
publicise that URL outside p5p  - instead

    http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/N/NW/NWCLARK/perl-5.8.2-RC1.tar.bz2

Once it's propagated round the CPAN mirrors I'll make an announcement
on use.perl

I'm particularly interested in

  0: binary compatibility between 5.8.2 and modules compiled under 5.8.0

  1: binary compatibility between 5.8.2 and modules compiled under 5.8.1

  2: how scripts that hash large amounts of data behave

  3: reassurance that it still build on Windows, VMS, OS/2, ...

  4: whether OS X and Solaris build all XS modules correctly now

  5: is modperl still happy

  6: does PAR work smoothly

I suspect that I've forgotten something important from that list

  rsync ftp.linux.activestate.com::perl-5.8.x/

will be at RC1 for the next 16 hours or so.

Nicholas Clark