nicholas writes "The Perl 5 developer team is pleased to announce the Perl Release 5.8.6, the sixth maintenance release of Perl 5.8. It was uploaded to CPAN shortly before the current master site issues, and so hasn't been affected by this."
The CPAN ftp multiplexor will pick a mirror close to you, if you select either bz2 (9693085 bytes) or gz (12254916 bytes) here; or, you can choose your own from one of the 259 CPAN mirrors worldwide.
md5sums for the tarballs:
3d030b6ff2a433840edb1a407d18dc0a perl-5.8.6.tar.bz2
8d4aa4e061fd5bc0c39e4f0a63267880 perl-5.8.6.tar.gz
5.8.6 is a maintenance release for perl 5.8, incorporating various minor bugfixes and optimisations. 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. 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. You may also be interested Perl 5.8.5 announcement, and can find out much more about Perl in general at the Perl home page.
-- Nicholas Clark, on behalf of the Perl5 Porters, 2004-11-30
