If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all
  you will have gained.

  -- Neil Gaiman, "The Graveyard Book"
[download]

It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.15.0.

This is the first DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.15.x series leading to a stable release of Perl 5.16.0. You can find a list of high-profile changes in this release in the file "perldelta.pod" inside the distribution.

You can download the 5.15.0 release from:

http://search.cpan.org/~dagolden/perl-5.15.0/

The release's SHA1 signatures are:

  08fe5e6ada034726991d5806df744206677fb01e  perl-5.15.0.tar.bz2
  75abfe2bd8818aa7a532340221446c36b4a6fb03  perl-5.15.0.tar.gz
[download]

We welcome your feedback on this release. If you discover issues with Perl 5.15.0, please use the 'perlbug' tool included in this distribution to report them. If Perl 5.15.0 works well for you, please use the 'perlthanks' tool included with this distribution to tell the all-volunteer development team how much you appreciate their work.

If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test your software against development releases. While we strive to maintain source compatibility with prior stable versions of Perl wherever possible, it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected consequences. If you spot a change in a development version which breaks your code, it's much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the next stable release. If you only test your code against stable releases of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change which breaks your code.

Notable changes in this release:

• CORE:: can be used on all keywords without using feature.pm
• $$ no longer caches PID
• Modules deprecated in 5.14.0 have been removed, including Shell.pm and Devel::Dprof
• Multiple bug fixes to regular expressions and the new character classes and flags
• Multiple bug fixes for copy-on-write scalars
• Multiple bug fixes for lvalue subroutines

Perl 5.15.0 represents approximately five weeks of development since Perl 5.14.0 and contains approximately 54,000 lines of changes across 618 files from 57 authors:

Alan Haggai Alavi, Bo Johansson, Bo Lindbergh, brian d foy, Chia-liang Kao, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Claudio Ramirez, Craig A. Berry, David Golden, David Leadbeater, David Mitchell, Dennis Kaarsemaker, Dominic Hargreaves, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, George Greer, Gisle Aas, H.Merijn Brand, Hojung Yoon, Ian Goodacre, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, Johan Vromans, John Hawkinson, John P. Linderman, Joshua ben Jore, Karl Williamson, Kevin J. Woolley, Leo Lapworth, Leon Brocard, Leon Timmermans, Louis Strous, Marcel Grünauer, Martin Hasch, Max Maischein, Michael Witten, Moritz Lenz, Nicholas Clark, Niko Tyni, Nuno Carvalho, Pau Amma, Peter John Acklam, Robin Barker, Salvador Fandińo, Samuel Thibault, Shawn M Moore, Shigeya Suzuki, Shlomi Fish, Sisyphus, Steffen Müller, Todd Rinaldo, Tom Christiansen, Tony Cook, Vladimir Timofeev, Zefram and Zsbán Ambrus.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.

Zefram will release 5.15.1 on July 20, 2011. Ricardo Signes will release 5.15.2 on August 20, 2011.

Regards, David