I’m half-way through my tenure as Perl release manager of the month. In just two weeks, I’ll be releasing Perl 5.13.3 while I’m at OSCON. Here’s what I’ve done so far:
- Writing a command-line tool to keep perldelta notes for each commit to the core repository in git notes and collate them for me by section to add to the perldelta
- Writing a command-line tool to propose specific commits for cherry picking back to the Perl 5.12 maintenance branch
- Actually working through the first week or so of commits for perldelta
- Applying a lot more patches from the p5p mailing list than I usually do
- Fixing a couple bugs
- Cherry picking the commits from 5.12 maintenance needed to “forward-port” the perl5121delta file to blead
I haven’t been as diligent about marking up commits as I’d hoped, partly due to personal commitments and partly due to the extra distractions of the CPAN Testers 2.0 release announcement. Now it’s a big enough backlog to be intimidating, so I need to pick off small pieces and work through it.
It looks like one of the big changes in Perl 5.13.3 will be updated dual-life modules. Chris (BinGOs) Williams has done a heroic job bringing dual-life modules up to date with the versions on CPAN. That’s a great step forward and gives us a long lead time for testing in advance of Perl 5.14.