Perl 5.14 released

 Announce, Community Submitted News  No Responses »
May 152011
 

Perl 5.14 has been officially released.

Some of the key changes are:

  • Unicode 6.0 support, along with many, many improvements to our Unicode-related features
  • Improved support for IPv6
  • Significantly easier autoconfiguration of the CPAN client
  • A new /r flag which makes s/// substitutions non-destructive
  • New regular expression flags to control whether matched strings should be treated as ASCII or Unicode
  • New “package Foo { }” syntax
  • Uses less memory and CPU than previous releases
  • A swathe of bug fixes, a large number associated with the work of Dave Mitchell who has been fixing some deep bugs thanks to a TPF grant

A big thanks goes to Jesse Vincent (release manager) and all the 150 contributors to this release.

YAPC::NA::2011 Update

 Community Submitted News, Conferences  No Responses »
May 112011
 

YAPC::NA::2011 in Ashville North Carolina 27-29th June 2011, is looking for BoFs, Hackathons and Training Courses:

  • Their current confirmed slot for training is Moose to be taught by Dave Rolsky. The registration for this will open very soon.
  • The registration for both Hackathons and BoFs is open. Organisers are looking for suggestions for topics.
  • Training space that is not used will be allocated to the hackathons and BoFs. There is also dedicated space for these. Speak to alh on irc.perl.org or use hackathon(at)yapc2011.us for more information or to submit a topic.

The hotel special rates will end in 10 days. The block booking will be released at midnight (US East Coast UTC-5) on the 20th May, use the code TPF when booking online at: http://www.ashevillecp.com/home/.

Cloud Support for Perl

 Websites  No Responses »
May 082011
 

There have been a couple of interesting announcements in the last couple of weeks about the support for Perl programming from cloud suppliers.

It’s good to see Perl given support in this area. If you see any more suppliers adding Perl to their platforms then please let us know in the comments.

Perl 5.14.0 Release Candidate 2 now available for testing

 Announce  No Responses »
May 042011
 

The second release candidate for Perl 5.14.0 is available for download from CPAN.

Since RC1:

  • Fixed a regression related to Unicode and character classes reported by George Greer
  • Muzzled several tests that hang on a variety of platforms
  • Fixed a typo that caused build problems with the vendor compiler on Solaris x86_64
  • Documented several new features that had previously been undocumented

While Perl5-Porters go to great lengths to ensure that new versions of Perl don’t break existing programs, it does happen. It’s really, really important that all unintentional breakages are caught before the final release of Perl 5.14.0.

As always, don’t get rid of your old perl before you know your stuff works with the new one.

If no “showstopper” class bugs are found in the next 7 days, Perl5-Porters will release a virtually identical tarball as Perl 5.14.0 on Wednesday, May 11.