acme

You cannot eat breakfast all day,
Nor is it the act of a sinner,
When breakfast is taken away,
To turn his attention to dinner;
And it's not in the range of belief,
To look upon him as a glutton,
Who, when he is tired of beef,
Determines to tackle the mutton.
Ah! But this I am willing to say,
If it will appease her sorrow,
I'll marry this lady today,
And I'll marry the other tomorrow!

-- William Schwenck Gilbert, "Trial By Jury"

It gives me great pleasure to announce Perl 5.12.4, the fifth stable release of Perl 5.12.

You can download Perl 5.12.4 from your favourite CPAN mirror or from:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.12.4/

SHA1 digests for this release are:

68ff2f4a0901d1e4ea263f452001db0563d2edb3 perl-5.12.4.tar.bz2
b64a5d1fefe6db9c4144b4adba2c360afa9c29ea perl-5.12.4.tar.gz

This release contains bug fixes, build fixes and documentation updates. It should be fully backward compatible with Perl 5.12.3.

Perl 5.12.4 is a recommended upgrade for all users of Perl 5.12.

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perl5124delta.pod" located in the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web at:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.12.4/pod/perl5124delta.pod

Perl 5.12.4 represents approximately 5 months of development since Perl 5.12.3 and contains approximately 200 lines of changes across 11 files from 8 authors.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.12.4:

Andy Dougherty, David Golden, David Leadbeater, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Jesse Vincent, Leon Brocard, Zsbán Ambrus.

The Perl 5.12 branch is now an older stable branch. The current stable branch is 5.14, and all users of 5.12 are recommended to upgrade to 5.14 when it is convenient. We expect to release Perl 5.14.2 in mid-September 2011, followed by Perl 5.14.3 in mid-December. The next major release of Perl 5, 5.16.0 should appear in spring 2012.

Cheers, Leon.