Perl 5.8.5 is boring... And why you should be excited by this

Nicholas Clark, Fotango

Binary compatibility should be maintained within major version.  Note that 5.10 will not be comatible with 5.8.  (but 5.8.5 is compat with 5.8.4)

problem of slow releases caused multiple bug reports

So by this time last year, 5.8.0 was a year old, but no updates had been issued in 12 months.  3 months of RC.  This led to panicked changes, interacting and slowing down actual production.

Multiple deliverables with platforms (OSX, RedHat, etc)

5.8.1 upgraded numerous modules from CPAN
UTF8 bugs fixed
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