Regular releases on a schedule are probably not a realistic goal for an open source project. Possibly not even desirable.
I think regular releases are very desirable. Even for an open source project. Just look at how 5.8.1 came to be. The first release candidate for 5.8.1 came a year after the release of 5.8.0. It took 5 release candidates, and two and a half months of hard work to get 5.8.1 out. Why? Because a year after the previous release, and no scedule for a next release, and 5.10 man years away, everyone wanted their new feature/bug-fix in.

If you have a garanteed release cycle, one every three or four months, it's easy to say to someone "you missed the deadline for this release' code-freeze, in three months time there's another". But what do you say if there's no scedule? "That's a great fix, we'll use it some time in the future"?

That pressure is reserved for pay-to-play software with a marketing cycle.
Perl isn't free. That is, it isn't free because making/maintaining/extending it doesn't cost resources. Maintaining Perl means people have to spend resources - not so much money, as well putting in time and lending expertise (and it takes investment to build expertise). The ratio of people contributing to Perl vs the people using Perl is very low. Which means that marketing is important for Perl. For every people contributing to Perl, you need thousands of people using Perl. If having regular releases is good from a marketing perspective - it will benefit Perl itself.
Perl --((8:>*

In reply to Re^2: what happened to regular releases by Perl Mouse
in thread what happened to regular releases by audiovolume

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