From: Jesse Vincent, to: perl5-porters@perl.org, Date Mon, 12 Apr 2010 22:28:04 -0400, Subject: Perl 5.12.0 is now available!

'Please would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, 'why your cat grins like that?'

'It's a Cheshire cat,' said the Duchess, 'and that's why. Pig!'

She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so she took courage, and went on again:--

'I didn't know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn't know that cats COULD grin.'

'They all can,' said the Duchess; 'and most of 'em do.'

-- Lewis Carroll, /Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/

On behalf of Perl's development team, It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.12.0.

Perl 5.12.0 represents approximately two years of development since version 5.10.0 and contains over 750,000 lines of changes across over 3,000 files from over 200 authors and committers.

SHA-1 signatures for this release:

f533687077e2da113b48a6c5e578f4a206fbf173 perl-5.12.0.tar.bz2
5341e60d099fdda71bc33b2a36e417fc0926518f perl-5.12.0.tar.gz
[download]
You can download this release from your nearest CPAN mirror or from:
http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.12.0/

This release cycle marks a change to a time-based release process. Beginning with version 5.11.0, we make a new development release of Perl available on the 20th of each month. Each spring, we will release a new stable version of Perl. One month later, we will make a minor update to deal with any issues discovered after the initial ".0" release. Future releases in the stable series will follow quarterly. In contrast to releases of Perl, maintenance releases will contain fixes for issues discovered after the .0 release, but will not include new features or behavior.

Notable changes in Perl 5.12 include:

Perl now conforms much more closely to the Unicode standard. Additionally, this release includes an upgrade to version 5.2 of the standard.

New experimental APIs allow developers to extend Perl with "pluggable" keywords and syntax.

Perl now has a better sense of time and will be able to keep accurate time well past the "Y2038" barrier.

New syntax allows developers to specify package version numbers directly in "package" statements

Perl now warns the user about the use of deprecated features by default.

Perl 5.12.0 features numerous new features, optimizations and bugfixes. You can find a complete list of these changes on the web at:

http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.12.0/pod/perl5120delta.pod
As specified in the licenses for Perl (see the files named Artistic or Copying in the Perl distribution), THIS PACKAGE IS PROVIDED WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.

Based on extensive testing over the past 3 months, we believe that Perl 5.12.0 is ready for production deployments. However, you should never blindly trust any software vendor. It is imperative that you test new software before deploying it in production.

While we have worked tirelessly to ensure that Perl 5.12.0 will be a solid platform for your software, it's possible that issues will be found after release day. You can find a current list of known issues with Perl 5.12.0 at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/errata.html

Best,

Jesse Vincent