Perl 5.31.1 is released!

On Tuesday, January 20, 2004, I sent Joel Bleifuss, my editor at _In These
Times_, this fax:

    ON ORANGE ALERT HERE.
    ECONOMIC TERRORIST ATTACK
    EXPECTED AT 8 PM EST. KV

Worried, he called, asking what was up. I said I would tell him when I had
more complete information on the bombs George Bush was set to deliver in his
State of the Union address.

That night I got a call from my friend, the out-of-print-science-fiction
writer Kilgore Trout. He asked me, "Did you watch the State of the Union
address?"

"Yes, and it certainly helped to remember what the great British socialist
playwright George Bernard Shaw said about this planet."

"Which was?"

"He said, 'I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are, they
must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum.' And he wasn't talking
about the germs or the elephants. He meant we the people."

"Okay."

"You don't think this is the Lunatic Asylum of the Universe?"

"Kurt, I don't think I expressed an opinion one way of the other."

"We are killing this planet as a life-support system with the poisons from
all the thermodynamic whoopee we're making with atomic energy and fossil
fuels, and everybody knows it, and practically nobody cares. This is how
crazy we are. I think the planet's immune system is trying to get rid of us
with AIDS and new strains of flu and tuberculosis, and so on. I think the
planet should get rid of us. We're really awful animals. I mean, that dumb
Barbra Stresiand song, 'People who need people are the luckiest people in
the world' -- she's talking about cannibals. Lots to eat. Yes, the planet is
trying to get rid of us, but I think it's too late."

And I said good-bye to my friend, hung up the phone, sat down and wrote this
epitaph: "The good Earth -- we could have saved it, but we were too damn
cheap and lazy."

    -- Kurt Vonnegut, _A Man without a Country_


We are over the moon to announce version 31.1, the second development
release of version 31 of Perl 5.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.31.1 from your
favorite CPAN mirror or find it at:

https://metacpan.org/release/ETHER/perl-5.31.1/

SHA1 digests for this release are:

  c68cbdaf18a73765421aa1bf1883691551c1aa81  perl-5.31.1.tar.gz
  60f9c587a107f73be9e35bc675ac4fdf7c969403  perl-5.31.1.tar.xz

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perldelta.pod" located in
the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web at

https://metacpan.org/pod/release/ETHER/perl-5.31.1/pod/perldelta.pod

Perl 5.31.1 represents approximately 4 weeks of development since Perl
5.31.0 and contains approximately 37,000 lines of changes across 500 files
from 20 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were
approximately 19,000 lines of changes to 340 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant
community of users and developers. The following people are known to have
contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.31.1:

Alexandr Savca, Andreas König, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Dagfinn Ilmari
Mannsåker, Dominic Hargreaves, Graham Knop, Hugo van der Sanden, James E
Keenan, Jerome Duval, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Manuel Mausz,
Michael Haardt, Nicolas R., Pali, Richard Leach, Sawyer X, Steve Hay, Tony
Cook, Vickenty Fesunov.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
generated from version control history. In particular, it does not include
the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues to
the Perl bug tracker.

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.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please
see the F<AUTHORS> file in the Perl source distribution.

We expect to release version 5.31.2 on 2019-07-20.  The next major stable
release of Perl 5, version 32.0, should appear in May 2019.

Use it together, use it in peace,
Karen Etheridge
ether@cpan.org

• Perl 5.31.1 is released! by Karen Etheridge