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Re: Perl plans for the squeeze cycle



Hi Martín, hi all,

Martín Ferrari wrote:
On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 14:41, Marc
Brockschmidt<marc@marcbrockschmidt.de> wrote:

* Which major upstream releases of perl are expected in the next two
 years? Which of those are material for Debian stable, which might be a bit
 flaky?

Even if I don't know current plans in the Perl community, Perl 5.8 was
released in July, 2002 and the next major release, 5.10, was released
in December, 2007. I spent a while trying to find the plans for 5.12,
but it seems that nothing has been said. What I could find was this
blog post/manifesto by chromatic static that "# No one can predict
when (or if) Perl 5.12 will come out.". On a side, perhaps ironic
note, in that post he's asking for predictable, time-based releases.
Who knows, maybe the Perl community can be talked into the big synch
process...

Disclaimer: To those who've been following along closely, it's no secret that I'm no fan of chromatic's recent drivel. Apparently, he lacks a basic understanding of the limitations and requirements of an established software project such perl5 and generalizes his experience with a piece of software that has seen no real-world usage yet (parrot).

Rafael Garcia-Suarez, the pumpking (the equivalent of the benevolent dictator, just not for life) for perl5 v10 and until recently[1] for perl5 v12 has laid out a plan for v12 in June[2]. You'll notice that he's not providing a simple hit-list of things that must go in but instead explains how he'd like to see it more malleable by extensions and how he wants remaining inconsistencies weeded out.

There are at least two reasons why you can't find any more of a roadmap than [2] at the moment. Firstly, the (understaffed) perl5-porters are currently working hard on weeding out release critical bugs in v10.1 and pushing it out of the door. This specifically requires the hard work and attention of those who would otherwise be qualified to produce a roadmap. v10.1 will contain much of the developments and bug fixes that went into the development branch of perl in the past 18 months, so it's not simple "patch two regressions and fire" release. Secondly and more importantly, Rafael's resignation has left us without a chief to flock by. It's not clear whether a single person will want (or be able to) walk in the tracks of the giants. It's likely that there will be some degree of change to how the perl core is maintained and there will be a great flamewar^Wdiscussion about this when the immediate goals have been reached-

Best regards,
Steffen

[1] http://consttype.blogspot.com/2009/07/resigning.html
[2] http://consttype.blogspot.com/2009/06/future-of-perl-5.html


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