And this announcement just came over p5p from RGARCIA himself:

    He would often declare, in speaking his thoughts upon the subject,
    that he did not conceive how the greatest family in England could
    stand it out against an uninterrupted succession of six or seven
    short noses.--And for the contrary reason, he would generally add,
    That it must be one of the greatest problems in civil life, where
    the same number of long and jolly noses, following one another in a
    direct line, did not raise and hoist it up into the best vacancies
    in the kingdom.
        -- Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Perl 5.10.0 is now out, the first in the 5.10.x major version series,
after a five year long development process. It's currently being
mirrored on CPAN.

A more formal announcement will follow via the usual canals.
I'm told a press release is also in the works.

I would like to thank everyone on perl5-porters for their efforts. I
hope we'll all be proud of what Perl is becoming. And ready to get back
to the keyboard for 5.12, for which, I hope, we'll not wait as long as
we waited for 5.10.

As a personal note, I can't wait to use 5.10 in production. All those
new features are quite exciting, aren't they?

Enjoy !

Update: And moritz provides the link to the p5p archive: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2007/12/msg131636.html

hope we'll all be proud of what Perl is becoming. And ready to get back to the keyboard for 5.12, for which, I hope, we'll not wait as long as we waited for 5.10.

I personally believe that we can ask perl for an estimate:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Date::Parse;
use Statistics::LineFit;

my $lf=Statistics::LineFit->new;
$lf->setData([4,6,8,10], [map str2time($_), split /\n/ => <<'.EOD']);
13 Jun 1997
22 Mar 2000
18 Jul 2002
18 Dec 2007
.EOD

my ($i,$s)=$lf->coefficients;
print "Perl 5.12 estimated release date: " . localtime($i+$s*12), "\n"
+;

__END__
[download]

Of course, anyone who both sucks less is better than me at statistics, and knows perl history better than I do, could improve on this. Anyway, I get:

Perl 5.12 estimated release date: Mon Jul  5 13:00:00 2010
[download]

--
If you can't understand the incipit, then please check the IPB Campaign.

So what is 5.10?

• perldelta for 5.10.0 (May not have reached your CPAN mirror yet)
• Perl 5.10 for People Who Aren't Totally Insane (slideshow)
• A list of 5.10 goodies by grinder

Somebody really really really really really really really needs to update http://dev.perl.org/perl5/. Now it's two major releases behind.

For me this was the fastest bittorrent download of all 2007.

Please seed http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/3938859/perl-5.10.0.tar.gz.3938859.TPB.torrent

Pros and Cons thus far for me. (Luckily the 'cons' are pretty (/very!) nit-picky. I just wanted to air my grievances)

Cons

• No smart not-match operator. !~~
• Perl 5.10 goodness not enabled by default. (I don't want more boilerplate.

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  use strict;
  use warnings;
  [download]

  is bad enough without use feature ":5.10";
• Perl 5.10 command-line goodness requires a chorded key (shift+e). I'm way more prone to typo'ing when a chord's involved. I know I'm going to type -lnWE and -lnwe<shift> a billion times. But, more likely, I'm going to patch my perl to make 'e' like 'E'.
• Boo for deprecating my $foo if 0;. Rightfully so... but still. :-)
• Boo for non-alphabetical release orderings. ("5.8.8" gt "5.10.0" -- I warned you these were nit-picky.).

Pros

• Hallelujah for finally adding // and //=!
• say "Hallelujah"; I'm already finding myself correcting print join("\t", @foo), $/; to the far Perlier say join "\t", @foo;

Hmm. The 'pros' list is shorter than I thought it'd be. Nonetheless, I'm happy overall.

Concerning your second point in the cons:

In the next version of perl use 5.012 will imply strict. I'm not sure if the patch is already in blead, but I'm confident it will be soon.