nicholas writes "The Perl 5 developer team is pleased to announce the Perl Release 5.8.3, the third maintenance release of Perl 5.8." Read on for details.
Perl 5.8.3 is available via the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network:
Asia
ftp://mirrors.hknet.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.3.tar.gz (Hong Kong)Europe
http://mirrors.sunsite.dk/cpan/src/perl-5.8.3.tar.gz (Denmark)North America
ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.3.tar.gz (CA)The MD5 sum for the perl-5.8.3.tar.gz is 6d2b389f8c6424b7af303f417947714f size 12002329 bytes.
The distribution is also available on CPAN as perl-5.8.3.tar.bz2, MD5 sum 92bdd4e8280e3d83c6e9d65444fc6f4c size 9509716 bytes
5.8.3 is a maintenance release for perl 5.8, incorporating various minor bugfixes, including eliminating a couple of errors in Perl's UTF8 handling. Please see the perldelta for the full details.
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.
This is a source code release, not a binary release. You will need a C development environment to build the sources. Binary releases will be made available by various vendors.
5.8.4 is planed for release in April 2004, concentrating on bug fixing and stability, and will be followed by further 5.8.x releases roughly quarterly.
To build and install Perl, and to find out how to report problems, please read the INSTALL file, and any relevant README.platform file.
As specified in the licenses for Perl (see the files named Artistic or Copying), THIS PACKAGE IS PROVIDED WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
As always, you should conduct an appropriate level of testing before using any new product in your production environment.
The "perldelta", which describes the most important changes for this release is available in the source distribution, or at:
http://search.cpan.org/user/nwclark/perl-5.8.3/pod/perl583delta.pod
If you missed the Perl 5.8.2 announcement:
http://dev.perl.org/perl5/news/2003/perl-5.8.2.html
You can find much more about Perl at:
-- Nicholas Clark, on behalf of the Perl5 Porters 2004-01-14
