We're approaching the two-year anniversary of the first release in the 5.7x series of the Catalyst framework. I'm really proud of how 5.7x has gone -- it has given the project some much needed stability that was missing in the early goings. It still amuses me to look back at the changelog to watch it go from version 3.X (which is basically "Catalyst 1.0") to 5.X in the span of about two and a half months.
Although development was obviously very fast-paced then, with 14 releases since 5.7000 I wouldn't say we've stalled. Naturally, the bulk of the changes since then have been bug fixes. We've also increased the test suite from 1416 tests to 1805 (the old test suite actually ran most tests twice by default, but, by setting CAT_BENCH_ITERS=1, you will see the "1416" result).
A 5.71 dev release (5.7099_01) was recently shipped which includes a new method: go(). As marcus describes it, it "works like an internal redispatch to another action, while retaining the stash intact." I believe one more dev release will happen as I've recently checked in the long lost PathPrefix attribute.
5.71xx will be more of a short-lived series of releases to act as a buffer between 5.70XX and 5.8000. 5.8000 being the Moose conversion (see this interview for more information).
For a change as massive as the Moose cutover, why not move to 6?
Re:Why 5.8?
LTjake on 2008-06-30T15:01:37
The "Moose" conversion will actually be totally transparent. We expect this to be an entirely behind-the-scenes effort with no effect on existing code.
Given that perspective, we decided 5.8 would be suitable.
