perl 5.11.4 is now available!
And you don’t suppose that I went into it headlong like a fool? I went into it like a wise man, and that was just my destruction. And you mustn’t suppose that I didn’t know, for instance, that if I began to question myself whether I had the right to gain power – I certainly hadn’t the right – or that if I asked myself whether a human being is a louse it proved that it wasn’t so for me, though it might be for a man who would go straight to his goal without asking questions…. If I worried myself all those days, wondering whether Napoleon would have done it or not, I felt clearly of course that I wasn’t Napoleon.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.4.
This is the fifth DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.11.x series leading to a stable release of Perl 5.12.0. You can find a list of high-profile changes in this release in the file “perl5114delta.pod” inside the distribution.
Perl 5.11.4 is the first release of Perl 5.11.x since the code freeze for Perl 5.12.0. It and subsequent releases in the 5.11 series include very limited code changes, almost entirely related to regressions from previous released versions of Perl or which resolve issues we believe would make a stable release of Perl 5.12.0 inadvisable.
You can download the 5.11.4 release from search.cpan.org
The release’s SHA1 signatures are:
MD5: 40f2199cc48de9cb27fd55d91b0d3b3a perl-5.11.4.tar.gz
SHA1: 16d26872078c880ffec222a63935d30fb0cbd25a perl-5.11.4.tar.gz
MD5: bafebb25fd9647bb9ca829477935b3f0 perl-5.11.4.tar.bz2
SHA1: 8eaaff0c2f8305787baba070ae84369158accbf7 perl-5.11.4.tar.bz2
This release corresponds to commit 2908b263df in Perl’s git repository. It is tagged as ‘v5.11.4’.
We welcome your feedback on this release. If you discover issues with Perl 5.11.4, please use the ‘perlbug’ tool included in this distribution to report them. If Perl 5.11.4 works well for you, please use the ‘perlthanks’ tool included with this distribution to tell the all-volunteer development team how much you appreciate their work.
If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test your software against development releases. While we strive to maintain source compatibility with prior stable versions of Perl wherever possible, it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected consequences. If you spot a change in a development version which breaks your code, it’s much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the next stable release. If you only test your code against stable releases of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change which breaks your code.
Perl 5.11.4 represents approximately one month of development since Perl 5.11.3 and contains 17682 lines of changes across 318 files from 40 authors and committers:
Abigail, Andy Dougherty, brian d foy, Chris Williams, Craig A. Berry, David Golden, David Mitchell, Father Chrysostomos, Gerard Goossen, H.Merijn Brand, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, Josh ben Jore, Karl Williamson, kmx, Matt S Trout, Nicholas Clark, Niko Tyni, Paul Marquess, Philip Hazel, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Rainer Tammer, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Shlomi Fish, Tim Bunce, Todd Rinaldo, Tom Christiansen, Tony Cook, Vincent Pit, and Zefram
Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl’s core. We’re grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.
Notable changes in this release:
- Version semantics have been more clearly defined
- Wide-ranging improvements to documentation, both to clarify and to correct
- Numerous CPAN “toolchain” modules have been updated to what we hope are the final release versions for Perl 5.12.0.
- Some crashing bugs or regressions from earlier releases of Perl were fixed for this release.
Development versions of Perl are released monthly on or about the 20th of the month by a monthly “release manager”. You can expect following upcoming releases:
February 20 - Steve Hay
March 20 - Ask Bjørn Hansen