Hello folks! It has been decided after some debate to remove Perl5 from the "Base FreeBSD" sources. This decision was not taken lightly, and was taken in consultation with (but not seeking the approval of) the perl5 developer community. There are 2 main reasons for this: 1) Perl5 is getting larger very fast, and FreeBSD cannot afford the time and space to build and maintain it. 2) Upgrading the "base perl" is a nightmare that regularly breaks upgrades and cross-builds, to the intense annoyance of the FreeBSD developer community. Speaking as the "Perl5 guy", keeping FreeBSD's "base perl" up to date was hellish, and folks who wish a return to that state should please consider doing this work in my place. BEWARE! This job is not trivial! PERL IS NOT BEING OSTRACISED! FreeBSD is not taking this action because of any dispute between the FreeBSD community and the Perl community - such a dispute DOES NOT EXIST! In fact, the Perl community have been exemplary in their attempts to understand the problem, and in their proposals to deal with it. FreeBSD DOES NOT HATE PERL! Some time in the future, perl may be split in half, such that the core language and the standard libraries may be separately installed. In such a case, FreeBSD might be in a position to better deal with the problem of the very large perl libraries. Such splitting will be done by the perl community, NOT by us, although we will be taking note. In the meanwhile, the Perl5 Port will continue to be available, and continued discussion indicates that there is very substantial support for it to be installed by default (or near-default) by sysinstall. This will result in a FreeBSD that has effectively the same Perl5 that is kept up-to-date in ports, rather than the one that is left to rot in STABLE. This update will _NOT_ be MFCed. The first FreeBSD that has no perl in the default sources will be 5.0-RELEASE, when that is released at the end of this year. FreeBSD-4.n will continue with the perl that it currently has. The ports system will continue to support Perl5. M -- o Mark Murray \_ O.\_ Warning: this .sig is umop ap!sdn This is the moderated mailing list freebsd-announce. The list contains announcements of new FreeBSD capabilities, important events and project milestones. See also the FreeBSD Web pages at http://www.freebsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-announce" in the body of the message