But then Australia is such a difficult country to keep track of. On my first visit, some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight reading a history of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the prime minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished. No trace of the poor man was ever seen again. This seemed doubly astounding to me—first that Australia could just _lose_ a prime minister (I mean, come on) and second that news of this had never reached me. -- Bill Bryson, /In a Sunburned Country/ I've just uploaded the first release candidate for Perl 5.14.0 to PAUSE. Shortly, you'll find it at: http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.14.0-RC1/ SHA1 sums for this release are: 643d688909723aaedbaef67301779331b3d51381 perl-5.14.0-RC1.tar.bz2 ed6be1b0f09af7542df369af254b629dbf5a8b5c perl-5.14.0-RC1.tar.gz While we go to lengths to ensure that new versions of Perl don't break existing programs, it does happen. It's really, really important that we catch unintentional breakage BEFORE we release Perl 5.14.0. It is imperative that you test this release candidate with any software written in Perl which you use or maintain. Similarly, we test Perl on a variety of operating systems on a number of platforms with several different compilers. If you're not 100% certain that we're testing yours, NOW is the time to make sure that Perl 5.14.0 builds and passes its tests on your platform. If no "showstopper" class bugs are found in the next 7 days, we will release a virtually identical tarball as Perl 5.14.0 on Thursday, April 28, 2011. Best, JesseThread Next