I see an initial statement from Hugo at http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-07/msg01609.html; I thought he had another list later, but I can't seem to find it. There don't seem to be a lot of specifics there.

As far as current goals go, I posted my (short) list here. Since then, Module::Build has had something of a flurry of development; I've been waiting for it to settle down before saying anything more. I have a m// enhancement patch I'm working on, also, but that's been slow going.

No, there's no target date; I'd just as soon set a cut off date at 2-4 months from now and put out an RC, but there doesn't seem to be a great drive for a release. I'm not sure why.

As to how many patches by how many people, my memory isn't that good. Recently, Dave Mitchell has certainly done a lot of work; Rafael Garcia-Suarez has also; others have worked on various specific ports/modules/issues: Paul Johnson, Greg Matheson, Autrijus Tang, SADAHIRO Tomoyuki, Stas Bekman, Tels, Marcus Holland-Moritz, Brendan O'Dea, Tassilo von Parseval, Alan Ferrency, Paul Szabo, and I have posted patches in the last week.

I'd never actually seen (that I recall) the claim that open source development is faster, but indeed it doesn't seem to be the case for Perl.