[OT] Perl 5.8.9 RC1 is out

[Nicholas Clark]

Sorry to digress from important topics such as beer, buffy and pie, but

  Perl 5.8.9 Release Candidate 1 has been uploaded to CPAN. This is a
  maintenance release for perl 5.8.x, providing bug fixes and integrating
  module updates from CPAN. Download the source from
  ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN/authors/id/N/NW/NWCLARK/perl-5.8.9-RC1.tar.bz2
  (or as .tar.gz ); read what's changed in
  http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.9-RC1/pod/perl589delta.pod

  Please report any problems you encounter, especially bugs introduced since
  5.8.8. Whenever possible, please report bugs using the perlbug utility. If
  the build or regression tests fail, make nok. If the build fails to early
  to run this, please mail perlbug at perl.org directly.

  We have only limited volunteer labour, and the maintenance burden is
  getting increasingly complex. Hence this will be the last significant
  release of the 5.8.x series. Any future releases of 5.8.x will likely only
  be to deal with security issues, and platform build failures. Therefore
  you should look to migrating to 5.10.x, if you have not started
  already. Alternatively, if business requirements constrain you to continue
  to use 5.8.x, you may wish to consider commercial support from firms such
  as ActiveState.

  All being well this will be the only release candidate, and the release
  will be in about 10 days.

[Blame Transfer Protocol initiated]

So yes, it works for my code, on FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE #7. [and maybe some other
other operating systems]. Slaven has tested it on a lot of CPAN.

*but*

no-one has tested it on *your* work code. And if you don't, and there are
regressions in RC1 that hurt your code, but you don't find out until after
5.8.9 is released, because you didn't test it now, then

a: I don't suffer. You do.
b: It's not my fault.

To quote:

  11:48 <@lathos> You're either with rc1 or you're with the terrorists.

My thoughts exactly.


5.8.9 is the last one I'm doing. After this, Dave takes over, and (as above)
he's not planning to do much on 5.8.x. 5.8.10 is likely to be build failures
only - no bug fixes. 5.10 is where the action is.

And no, I'm not out of a job. No sooner have I managed to get rid of that one,
than I get a new one:

http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/11/tpf_announces_grant_to_david_m.html

Nicholas Clark