[VPM] ANN - Perl 5.11.0 released

Darren Duncan darren at darrenduncan.net
Fri Oct 2 22:48:17 PDT 2009


For those of you that use Perl 5, this is a brief announcement that Perl 5.11.0
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



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