The Perl 5 developer team is pleased to announce the Perl Release 5.8.9, the ninth maintenance release of Perl 5.8. The CPAN ftp multiplexor will pick a mirror close to you, if you select either bz2 (11121414 bytes) or gz (13954888 bytes) here; or, you can choose your own from one of the 272 CPAN mirrors worldwide.
shasums for the tarballs:
1097fbcd48ceccb2bc735d119c9db399a02a8ab9f7dc53e29e47e6a8d0d72e79 perl-5.8.9.tar.bz2
60dfe024286299b547895b6bc8f41c20c7e83d292f3a406e113ba1951aa38da1 perl-5.8.9.tar.gz
md5sums for the tarballs:
1cb52a76ce77fa300218da96577793ec perl-5.8.9.tar.bz2
2c8d78a61fb8c4c2c19fc514eb591500 perl-5.8.9.tar.gz
5.8.9 is a maintenance release for perl 5.8, incorporating various
minor bugfixes and optimisations. Please see the perldelta
for the full details. Please report bugs using the
perlbug utility. If the build or regression tests fail,
make nok. If the build fails to early to run this, please
mail perlbug at perl.org directly.
If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core committers, who be able to help assess the impact of issues, figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is supported. Please only use this address for security issues in the Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
We have only limited volunteer labour, and the maintenance burden is getting increasingly complex. Hence this will be the last significant release of the 5.8.x series. Any future releases of 5.8.x will likely only be to deal with security issues, and platform build failures. Therefore you should look to migrating to 5.10.x, if you have not started already. Alternatively, if business requirements constrain you to continue to use 5.8.x, you may wish to consider commercial support from firms such as ActiveState.
This is a source code release, not a binary release. You will need a C development environment to build the sources. Binary releases will be made available by various vendors. To build and install Perl, and to find out how to report problems, please read the INSTALL file, and any relevant README.platform file. As specified in the licenses for Perl (see the files named Artistic or Copying), THIS PACKAGE IS PROVIDED WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. As always, you should conduct an appropriate level of testing before using any new product in your production environment.
The perldelta, which describes the most important changes for this release is available in the source distribution. You may also be interested Perl 5.8.8 announcement, and can find out much more about Perl in general at the Perl home page.
-- Nicholas Clark, on behalf of the Perl5 Porters, 2008-12-16