There's a whisper down the line at 11.39
        When the Night Mail's ready to depart,
        Saying 'Skimble where is Skimble has he gone to hunt the thimble?
        We must find him of the train can't start.'
        All the guards and all the porters and the stationmaster's daughters
        They are searching high and low,
        Saying 'Skimble where is Skimble for unless he's very nimble
        Then the Night Mail just can't go'
        At 11.42 then the signal's overdue
        And the passengers are frantic to a man--
        Then Skimble will appear and he'll saunter to the rear:
        He's been busy in the luggage van!
            He gives one flash of his glass-green eyes
              And the the signal goes 'All Clear!'
            And we're off at last of the northern part
              Of the Northern Hemisphere!

        from 'Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat' by T.S. Eliot

Get it now from

  http://opensource.fotango.com/~nclark/perl-5.8.4-RC1.tar.bz2

(or s/bz2$/gz/ if you really want a 25% larger download.)

coming soon to a CPAN mirror near you soon as

ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN/authors/id/N/NW/NWCLARK/perl-5.8.4-RC1.ta...

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

I'm interested in confirmation of binary compatibility between 5.8.4 and
modules compiled under previous 5.8.x releases, and anything which is a new
bug in 5.8.4, particularly if it breaks current modules on CPAN.

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

will be at RC1 for the next day or so.

All being well the real thing arrives in about a week.

Nicholas Clark