I've volunteered to write the release notes for the upcoming 5.8.9 release of Perl. However I rapidly discovered there's an awful lot of changes that need to be examined and distilled into the final document that will become perl589delta.pod.
Luckily, this is a task that's easily broken into chunks and run in parallel, and I've done exactly that. I've got a copy of all the changes that have gone into the 5.8 branch since 5.8.8 was released, and I've chunked it by month. Some months are quiet, with not many changes, and some months are very busy, with lots of changes.
I'm making a call out to the Perl community to volunteer to help with the writing of the release notes. You don't need to be familiar with Perl's guts to do this; if you don't understand a change we'll have a "too hard" bucket that things can be thrown into, and someone (who may be me) will figure them out. Likewise, you don't need a lot of time; I'm not expecting everyone who volunteers for a chunk of work to finish the entire chunk, just as long as you work on it sequentially and let us know where you're up to, you can put it down at any time.
Contributing to the perl589delta project directly helps with the release of Perl 5.8.9. However you'll also get a mention in the prestigious Perl authors file, which looks totally awesome on your resume, and gives you super bragging rights. If you're on ohloh, you'll get kudos from me, and commit points from the project. Your work will almost certainly give you enough material for a 5-minute "What's new in my bit of Perl 5.8.9" lightning talk, which will make you incredibly popular at conferences and user-groups.
In order to get started, just follow the instructions in the README file at the bottom of our source control repository page and sign up to the discussion list.
Feel free to track the repository or sign up the list even if you're not sure if you want to contribute, and are just curious about how all this works. We're happy to have the company!
If you have any questions, or would like to volunteer, you can e-mail me at pjf@cpan.org, mail the perl589delta team at perl589delta@googlegroups.com, or simply post a comment on this journal if you're reading it on use.perl.org.
