From darren at darrenduncan.net  Fri Oct  2 22:48:17 2009
From: darren at darrenduncan.net (Darren Duncan)
Date: Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:48:17 -0700
Subject: [VPM] ANN - Perl 5.11.0 released
Message-ID: <4AC6E5A1.4070804@darrenduncan.net>

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


From darren at darrenduncan.net  Thu Oct 15 00:00:32 2009
From: darren at darrenduncan.net (Darren Duncan)
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:32 -0700
Subject: [VPM] ANN - SQLite 3.6.19 adds foreign keys support
Message-ID: <4AD6C890.7010605@darrenduncan.net>

For those of you that use or are considering the excellent SQLite DBMS,

... I just wanted to let you know that the SQLite developers have now released 
the first version, 3.6.19, which has support for enforcing SQL foreign keys 
(previously you had to use triggers to have a similar effect).

See http://sqlite.org/foreignkeys.html for the details of the foreign key 
support that SQLite now has.

Also be sure to look at the section http://sqlite.org/foreignkeys.html#fk_enable
, because you have to enable a pragma on each connect to use the foreign keys
feature; it isn't yet on by default for backwards compatibility purposes.

As I imagine many of the actual or potential SQLite users have been pining away 
for SQLite to support this feature for a long while, you'll want to dig in right 
away.  Oh, and they want people to test it.

As the official SQLite release announcement says:  "This release has been 
extensively tested (we still have 100% branch test coverage).  [The SQLite 
developers] consider this release to be production ready.  Nevertheless, testing 
can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence.  So if you encounter 
problems, please let us know."

If you feel that a bug you find is in SQLite itself rather than an adaptor for 
your language of choice (unless you use C, wherein you use it directly), the 
main users email forum for SQLite in general is at:

   http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users

... where you can report it as an appropriate list post (the SQLite issue
tracking system is no longer updateable by the public; posting in the list can
cause an update there by a registered SQLite developer).

If you would use it directly such as with C, you can get it here:

   http://sqlite.org/download.html

On a tangent, DBD::SQLite version 1.26_05 , the Perl binding for SQLite, has 
also been released today and bundles 3.6.19; you can get it at:

   http://search.cpan.org/~adamk/DBD-SQLite-1.26_05/

For people using this, we request that you test the new version, especially with 
foreign key usage, and report any bugs you find specific to that on RT.

Thank you. -- Darren Duncan