It's time for a snapshot. Actually, it's probably been time for a snapshot for quite a while, but I've had a tough few weeks at work, and been away to the German Perl Workshop, so haven't managed to actually release one.
Anyway, http://www.ccl4.org/~nick/P/perl-23940.tar.bz2 is what there is so far. There's some stuff in blead that I've not merged yet, but I thought it better to get a snapshot out than delay and try to get it in. I need to make time to work out what the implications of Ton's proposals for utf8 and unpack are on existing code, and how safe it all feels for a mature maintenance release. Plus I'm aware of Dan Kogai's pending release of Encode, which I've also not yet commented on. Meanwhile, as has been mentioned indirectly a few times, is that the 5.8.7 code freeze is at the end of this month. ie about 9 days away. Sorry about not being very effective at making noise about this. Then again, I'm unkeen on lots of changes going in just before a release, so part of me thinks that it might be a pragmatic move to keep code freeze dates as forgettable as possible :-) By design or by accident all this sort of comes down to "if you've not started something yet, it will fit nicely in 5.8.8". Slushy periods are this side of a code freeze, not that side. Else releases never ship. For added fun, I'm out of the country for the last few days before the code freeze, and probably without network access for the 24 hours beforehand :-) So if you really really want to herd late changes into blead, you'll need to be in a good working relationship with someone else active with commit, and best not someone going to FOSDEM. Nicholas Clark
