16 December 2008, 09:00

Perl 5.8.9 released

Perl 5.8.9 has been released as the latest and probably last significant release of the Perl 5.8 series. Future releases of the Perl 5.8 series are expected to only deal with security and platform build issues. The developers note that users of Perl should look at migrating to the newer 5.10.x series if they can because of the many bug fixes which could not be back ported to the 5.8 series. Perl 5.10.1 is expected to arrive in the near future.

The news that 5.8.9 was released is mostly a quotation from "The Complete Yes Minister", but a more formal announcement on use.perl is expected soon.

Perl 5.8.9 has numerous bug fixes and enhancements, including an updated Unicode character database, the ability to create relocatable Perl trees, better internal caching of UTF8, an upgraded debugger, more platforms supported for compilation and performance enhancements.

A novel change is the addition of a new utility perlthanks. This works like perlbug, which is used to send bug reports to authors and maintainers, except that perlthanks is for non-bug reports, so Perl users can say thank you and hopefully improve the morale of the Perl developers.

(djwm)

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