Perl 5.17.0 is now available

    `Welcome, comrades!'  Burya opened his arms toward the soldier.
    `Yes it is true!  With help from our allies of the Festival, the iron
    hand of the reactionary junta is about to be overthrown for all time!
    The new economy is being born; the marginal cost of production has
    been abolished, and from now on, if any item is produced once, it can
    be replicated infinitely.  From each according to his imagination,
    to each according to his needs!  Join us or better still, bring your
    fellow soldiers and workers to join us!'

    There was a sharp bang from the roof of the Corn Exchange, right at
    the climax of his impromptu speech; heads turned in alarm.  Something
    had broken inside the spork factory and a stream of rainbow-hued
    plastic implements fountained toward the sky and clattered to the
    cobblestones on every side, like a harbinger of the postindustrial
    society to come.  Workers and peasants alike stared in open-mouthed
    bewilderment at this astounding display of productivity, then bent to
    scrabble in the muck for the brightly colored sporks of revolution.
    A volley of shots rang out and Burya Rubenstein raised his hands,
    grinning wildly, to accept the salute of the soldiers from the Skull
    Hill garrison.

        -- Charles Stross, "Singularity Sky"

It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.17.0.

This is the first DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.17.x series leading to
a stable release of Perl 5.18.0.  You can find a list of high-profile
changes in this release in the file "perldelta.pod" inside the
distribution.

You can download the 5.17.0 release from:

    https://metacpan.org/release/ZEFRAM/perl-5.17.0

The release's SHA-1 signatures are:

    2bde34ec3203866b51e607f575cc03e51c70f894  perl-5.17.0.tar.bz2
    1a1459ed1e52920fcf5e1439030e9a8325f77a1c  perl-5.17.0.tar.gz

This release corresponds to commit 028eed19bd in Perl's git repository.
It is tagged as "v5.17.0".

We welcome your feedback on this release.  If you discover issues
with Perl 5.17.0, please use the "perlbug" tool included in this
distribution to report them.  If Perl 5.17.0 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 5.17.0 represents approximately 1 week of development since Perl
5.16.0 and contains approximately 17,000 lines of changes across 180
files from 26 authors:

    Alan Haggai Alavi, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Brian Fraser, Chris 'BinGOs'
    Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Eric Brine,
    Father Chrysostomos , Igor Zaytsev, James E Keenan, Karl Williamson,
    Leon Timmermans, Lukas Mai, Marcus Holland-Moritz, Matthew Horsfall,
    Moritz Lenz, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes,
    Robin Barker, Ronald J. Kimball, Smylers, Steffen Müller, Steve Hay,
    Tony Cook, Zefram.

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

    2012-05-26  5.17.0          Zefram
    2012-06-20  5.17.1          Jesse Luehrs
    2012-07-20  5.17.2          TBD
    2012-08-20  5.17.3          TBD
    2012-09-20  5.17.4          TBD
    2012-10-20  5.17.5          TBD
    2012-11-20  5.17.6          TBD
    2012-12-20  5.17.7          TBD
    2013-01-20  5.17.8          TBD (Contentious code freeze)
    2013-02-20  5.17.9          TBD (User-visible code freeze)
    2013-03-20  5.17.10         TBD (Full code freeze)
    2013-04-??  5.18.0-RC0      Ricardo Signes
    2013-05-18  5.18.0 (final)  Ricardo Signes

Enjoy!

-zefram

• Perl 5.17.0 is now available by Zefram
• Re: Perl 5.17.0 is now available by Ricardo Signes