Perl 5.11.5 is now available!

    A little child, a limber elf,
    Singing, dancing to itself,
    A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
    That always finds, and never seeks,
    Makes such a vision to the sight
    As fills a father's eyes with light;
    And pleasures flow in so thick and fast
    Upon his heart, that he at last
    Must needs express his love's excess
    With words of unmeant bitterness.
    Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together
    Thoughts so all unlike each other;
    To mutter and mock a broken charm,
    To dally with wrong that does no harm.
    Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty
    At each wild word to feel within
    A sweet recoil of love and pity.
    And what, if in a world of sin
    (O sorrow and shame should this be true!)
    Such giddiness of heart and brain
    Comes seldom save from rage and pain,
    So talks as it's most used to do.

        -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, /Christabel/

It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.5.

This is the sixth DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.11.x series leading to a
stable release of Perl 5.12.0. You can find a list of high-profile changes
in this release in the file "perl5115delta.pod" inside the distribution.

Perl 5.11.5 is the second release of Perl 5.11.x since the code freeze for Perl
5.12.0.  It and subsequent releases in the 5.11 series include very limited
code changes, almost entirely related to regressions from previous released
versions of Perl or which resolve issues we believe would make a stable
release of Perl 5.12.0 inadvisable.

You can download the 5.11.5 release from:

    http://search.cpan.org/~shay/perl-5.11.5/

The release's SHA1 signatures are:

  MD5:  cce1928d12d2b05524cce3e79ea4776e          perl-5.11.5.tar.gz
  SHA1: a7cb585b226220d28d0cd6a1e159ab38d88917a8  perl-5.11.5.tar.gz

  MD5:  07dca6906670ded63e535f95c0c82dff          perl-5.11.5.tar.bz2
  SHA1: 91892615c1d85d727baec3589640015eb6109fe8  perl-5.11.5.tar.bz2

This release corresponds to commit b3289bd223 in Perl's git repository.
It is tagged as 'v5.11.5'.

We welcome your feedback on this release. If you discover issues
with Perl 5.11.5, please use the 'perlbug' tool included in this
distribution to report them. If Perl 5.11.5 works well for you, please
use the 'perlthanks' tool included with this distribution to tell the
all-volunteer development team how much you appreciate their work.

If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test
your software against development releases. While we strive to maintain
source compatibility with prior stable versions of Perl wherever possible,
it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected
consequences. If you spot a change in a development version which breaks
your code, it's much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the
next stable release. If you only test your code against stable releases
of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change
which breaks your code.

Perl 5.11.5 represents approximately one month of development since
Perl 5.11.4 and contains 9618 lines of changes across 151 files
from 33 authors and committers:

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Abigail, brian d foy, Chris Williams, David Golden,
David Mitchell, Eric Brine, Frank Wiegand, Gisle Aas, H.Merijn Brand, Jan
Dubois, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, John Peacock, Josh ben Jore, Karl
Williamson, Marcus Holland-Moritz, Michael G Schwern, Nicholas Clark, Offer
Kaye, Philippe Bruhat (BooK), Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Reini Urban, Ricardo
Signes, Robin Barker, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Mueller, Steve Hay, Steve Peters,
Tim Bunce, Todd Rinaldo, Tony Cook and Vincent Pit.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN
modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN
community for helping Perl to flourish.

Notable changes in this release:

* The 32-bit limit on substr arguments has now been removed.

* Numerous improvements to the charnames handler, the processing of \N{...}
  and the reporting of related warnings and errors.

* A bug in gmtime64 that caused it to break around 2**48 has been fixed.

* Several crashing bugs or regressions from earlier releases of Perl were
  fixed for this release.

Development versions of Perl are released monthly on or about the 20th
of the month by a monthly "release manager". You can expect following
upcoming releases:

 March 20       -    Ask Bjørn Hansen
 April 20       -    Leon Brocard
 May 20         -    Ricardo Signes
 June 20        -    Philippe Bruhat
 July 20        -    Matt Trout
 August 20      -    David Golden

Enjoy!

Steve Hay

• Perl 5.11.5 is now available! by Steve Hay