nicholas writes "Perl 5.8.9 Release Candidate 1 has been uploaded to CPAN. This is a maintenance release for perl 5.8.x, providing bug fixes and integrating module updates from CPAN. Download the source from ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN/authors/id/N/NW/NWCLARK/perl-5.8.9-RC1.tar.bz2 (or as .tar.gz ); read what's changed in perldelta.pod."
Please report any problems you encounter, especially bugs introduced since 5.8.8. Whenever possible, 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.
We have only limited volunteer labour, and the maintenance burden is getting
increasingly complex. Hence this will be the last significant release of the
5.8.x series. Any future releases of 5.8.x will likely only be to deal with
security issues, and platform build failures. Therefore you should look to
migrating to 5.10.x, if you have not started already. Alternatively, if business
requirements constrain you to continue to use 5.8.x, you may wish to consider
commercial support from firms such as ActiveState.
All being well this will be the only release candidate, and the release will be in about 10 days.
