Perl 5.11.2

The streets were pretty quiet, which was nice. They're always quiet here
at that time: you have to be wearing a black jacket to be out on the
streets between seven and nine in the evening, and not many people in the
area have black jackets. It's just one of those things. I currently live
in Colour Neighbourhood, which is for people who are heavily into colour.
All the streets and buildings are set for instant colourmatch: as you
walk down the road they change hue to offset whatever you're wearing.
When the streets are busy it's kind of intense, and anyone prone to
epileptic seizures isn't allowed to live in the Neighbourhood, however
much they're into colour.
- Michael Marshall Smith, "Only Forward"

It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.2.

This is the third 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 "perl5112delta.pod" inside the distribution.

You can download the 5.11.2 release from:

http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/perl-5.11.2/

The release's SHA1 signatures are:

2988906609ab7eb00453615e420e47ec410e0077 perl-5.11.2.tar.gz
0014442fdd0492444e1102e1a80089b6a4649682 perl-5.11.2.tar.bz2

We welcome your feedback on this release. If you discover issues with Perl 5.11.2, please use the 'perlbug' tool included in this distribution to report them. If Perl 5.11.2 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.

Notable changes in this release:

  • It is now possible to overload the C operator
  • Extension modules can now cleanly hook into the Perl parser to define new kinds of keyword-headed expression and compound statement
  • The lowest layers of the lexer and parts of the pad system now have C APIs available to XS extensions
  • Use of C<:=> to mean an empty attribute list is now deprecated

Perl 5.11.2 represents approximately 3 weeks development since Perl 5.11.1 and contains 29,992 lines of changes across 458 files from 38 authors and committers:

Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, Ben Morrow, Bo Borgerson, Brad Gilbert, Bram, Chris Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel Frederick Crisman, Dave Rolsky, David E. Wheeler, David Golden, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Frank Wiegand, Gerard Goossen, Gisle Aas, Graham Barr, Harmen, H.Merijn Brand, Jan Dubois, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Karl Williamson, Kevin Ryde, Leon Brocard, Nicholas Clark, Paul Marquess, Philippe Bruhat, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Sisyphus, Steffen Mueller, Steve Hay, Steve Peters, Vincent Pit, Yuval Kogman, Yves Orton, 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.

Jesse Vincent or a delegate will release Perl 5.11.3 on December 20, 2009. Ricardo Signes will release Perl 5.11.4 on January 20, 2010. Steve Hay will release Perl 5.11.5 on February 20, 2010.

Regards, Léon

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About acme

user-pic Léon Brocard (aka acme) is an orange-loving Perl eurohacker with many varied contributions to the Perl community, including the GraphViz module on the CPAN. YAPC::Europe was all his fault. He is still looking for a Perl Monger group he can start which begins with the letter 'D'.