Perl 5.6 was released on March 23rd. That's a full 7 months ago. In the meantime, I as a perl programmer, who is also a Debian developer, and who prefers to use what is in Debian, found myself falling behind. I wasn't able to investigate the cool new stuff in perl 5.6. Some of it is clearly stuff I can use in my programs to significantly improve them, but if I do, I will not be able to put those improvements into my Debian packages, since Debian still doesn't support perl 5.6.
There was plenty of excuse for nothing being done about packaging perl 5.6 for Debian while potato was in the freeze, but that has been no excuse for 1 and a half months now, and in that time I've not seen perl's maintainer doing anything to get perl 5.6 into Debian. But just 2 days after Debian's release, Brendan O'Dea stunned me by producing perl 5.6 debs that dropped into a Debian system, and acted as the default perl without breaking anything. Even better, they reverted the package name back to "perl" (no more perl-5.005 unsightliness), and they have a very intelligent way of using dependancies to deal with future changes in the perl XS module API without requiring such ugly package names in the future. There's just one problem: They're still not in Debian, and I still cannot make my packages use all the nifty new features of perl 5.6. And I really don't understand why. I've seen almost no discussion of them on this list, and I've seen no reaction from the perl maintainer at all. Darren, are you still there? Doesn't anyone care about getting perl 5.6 into Debian? -- see shy jo
