Jarkko Hietaniemi, venerable pumpking of the perl 5.8.0 development, Monday posted a timeline for finishing up perl 5.8.0, hopefully now before the end of May. It's shaping up very well, and all the help you can provide is welcome.
The Plan as of now:
- 5.7.3 in two weeks - the Release Candidate One two weeks after that (this being the first release that installs as 'perl', as opposed to perl5.7.X) - then RCs in quick procession (weekly or so), as many as it takes - 5.8.0 hopefully out before the end of May
Therefore:
- test build on as many platforms as you can, especially rarer ones: self-sufficiency in fixing test failures highly appreciated
- test as many modules as you can: note that failures here are not necessarily the end of the world since this is still 5.***7***.3, but of course act appropriately: figure out whose fault it is (bleadperl or the module or both), and notify appropriate parties
- if your module is in the core but bleadperl doesn't have the latest version, let us know
- if you know of a module in CPAN but bleadperl doesn't have the latest version let us know (Text::Soundex doesn't count, it's a known exception)
- there is one module I'm still eyeing for inclusion: Math::BigRat (to round off our bignum support), on which mjd is working
- if you have been working on your pet patch, now is the time to finish it and propose it
- make Schwern poorer
- remind us of your pet bugs: I know I have been filing many under "later" lately since I've been concentrating on the remaining EBCDIC problems
- go to bugs.perl.org and squash as many as you can
We should turn this into a proper press release and distribute it via the Perl Foundation. OK, so strictly it's vapourware[1] right now but other people get away with pre-announcing vapourware all the time.
[1] Ok, so it's not really vapourware as pre-release versions already exist. Maybe we should jsut say they're betas
Re:Press Release
blech on 2002-02-25T10:27:31
This would be a good idea, I agree. Of course, you'd need to say what's new in 5.8.0, and why it's worth upgrading. I don't follow p5p; could someone either point out the changes here or link to something that does?
In case you are not a perl5-porters regular (maybe because you have a life, or something similar), you can get the latest developer snaphots from funet. As of now, the latest one is perl@14833, snapshots came out at the rate of about three a week.
Configure -des -Dusedevel; make all testand if all goes well, rebuild with some testing prefix
Configure -des -Dusedevel -Dprefix=/usr/local/test;make all test installand then you can test your software and favourite modules. Note that before RC1 the binaries will have 5.7.3 tacked onto them.
Where can I get a list of what reasons I should have for upgrading to 5.8.0? I'm running 5.6.1 on most of my machines now. What differences can I expect?
Re:So what's in 5.8.0?
jhi on 2002-02-25T15:19:28
The latest version of perldelta is available through the repository browser.
5.7.3 will come out Monday, 2002-03-04. (It may slip into late Mondayevening my time, US/Eastern, as opposed to the usual my morning.) The 5.8.0 RC1 bug-fixes-only code freeze three weeks after that,Monday 2002-03-25. The RC1 two weeks after that, Monday 2002-04-08.
