ANN - Perl 5.11.0 released
Darren Duncan
has been released; this is the first development release of the next major
version of Perl 5, which will eventually cumulate with the 5.12.0 for-production
release (the current production release is 5.10.1, which came out in August).
You can get it from http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.11.0/ .
The official release announcement is at
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2009/10/msg151376.html .
A blog post with something useful to say is at
http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/10/why-perl-5110-matters.html .
If I were to point out what *I* see as the single most significant change in
5.11.0, it would be not the product itself (which has many actual updates), but
in the development or release management process.
From now on, Perl 5 will follow the trend previously set by Parrot and Rakudo
(a Perl 6 implementation), in that releases will now come out on a regular
monthly schedule, on the 20th of each month. So Perl 5.11.1 will come out on
2008 Oct 20, 5.10.2 on Nov 20, and so on. And so, users will get quasi-stable
access to the latest developments with no more than a month's wait at a time.
Also, this helps the release managers as they only have a month's worth of
changes to deal with at a time. The change should also help speed up or actual
development, as it would be more rewarding to do so; you know your updates get
used sooner.
This is in contrast with the prior status quo which often saw a lot of time
between releases (1.6 years between 5.10.0 and 5.10.1 was problematic) where
features had been added or bugs fixed for a long time but weren't actually
available to users save those applying individual patches or downloading from
the version control, which could be less stable at the time. And release
managers tended to burn out.
-- Darren Duncan