Patch pumpking Jarkko Hietaniemi has released perl 5.7.0. Check out the announcement below. The www.cpan.org and fi.cpan.org links work as of this posting; the others all will as soon as the mirrors finish picking the release up.
Note that, as the announcement states, Perl 5.7.0 is an unstable development release, not for production use.
Perl 5.7.0 Has Been Released
The Librarian had seen many weird things in his time, but that had to be the 57th strangest. [footnote: he had a tidy mind] -- Terry Pratchett, "Moving Pictures"
The source code is available for example from
http://www.cpan.org/src/perl-5.7.0.tar.gz http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.7.0.tar.gz http://ca.cpan.org/src/perl-5.7.0.tar.gz http://fi.cpan.org/src/perl-5.7.0.tar.gz http://jp.cpan.org/src/perl-5.7.0.tar.gz
and from all the other CPAN mirror sites under the src/ directory. As you can guess from the above list yourcountrycode.cpan.org is a good bet, http://www.cpan.org/SITES.html lists all the sites.
Overview of changes is available within the distribution in pod format as perldelta (pod/perldelta.pod). Detailed list of changes is in the Changes file.
Perl 5.7.0 Is An Unstable Development Release
As promised when 5.6.0 came out, Perl 5 has now been clearly separated into stable maintenance releases and unstable development releases. Releases with even version numbers (6, 8) will be maintenance releases and odd version numbers (7) will be development releases.
The whole Perl 5.7 branch is a development branch. Its releases are potentially unstable and they are
NOT meant for production use
Data corruption and crashes are possible because new not yet fully tested features have been introduced. System administrators should NOT install these Perls for their users. Vendors or organizations releasing software packages should NOT package and distribute these Perls to their customers or users as a new better Perl distribution.
If you are looking for a maintenance release, please wait for the Perl 5.6.1 release. It will incorporate the stable bug fixes and component upgrades that have gone into 5.7.0.
Perl 5.7 is for you if you want to help out in developing Perl 5.
The Future of Perl 5
The Perl 6 project has begun (http://www.perl.org/perl6/) and therefore no extensive changes to Perl 5 are expected. Perl 5 will continue to be maintained.
Enjoy.
-- Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi>
