Perl5.10.0 is under development;
Well, technically it is, but it's crawling along. 5.8.0 was
released a year and a half ago, and the road towards 5.10.0
was started soon afterwards. Hugo, the pumpking had some big
plans for 5.10 - but I don't get the impression any work has
been done on it. Do you know the current goals for 5.10, and
how much of it has been done for it? Have you heard any target
date for 5.10? How many patches have you seen the pumpking
apply the last year? How many patches have you seen submitted recently? By how many people?
As for perl6, we're now 3.5 years down the road and it's
almost a year ago since the last apocalypse was released.
Sure, the 5.8.x track has a 3-month release schedule. But
those are maintainance releases.
Perl development hasn't stopped - but it isn't bursting
either. There are only a few contributers. I can't blame
outsiders from thinking Perl is hardly being developped.
We all like to chant that development of open source goes
faster proprietairy software. But that doesn't seem to be
the case for Perl.
Abigail
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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.
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Ow! That breaks ascii sorting of version numbers! Perhaps Perl needs to follow Zeno's paradox and keep moving a half step towards six with each major release. Of course, this would cause a lot of really bad jokes, since "we'd never really get there" :)
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This is not a problem. You can still compare either $] as a number or $^V as a string (or will it become a version object?) and it will give you correct results.
GNU ls has the -v option to sort 8 before 10, I also find that useful.
(OT: Did you notice that files of dos version x.yy are released with modification time x:yy am?)
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Also, that would be an epigon of the version nubers of TeX and plain.tex, that converge to Pi.
And odd minor version numbers are only for development releases, so if you want that people use new Perls, you should not use version numbers such as 5.9.999.
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