Re: Approaching pre-5.44 code freeze; some recommendations

I fully support staying ahead of things to make sure we actually release 
in May. I appreciate you getting the ball rolling.

Is replacing the PRNG contentious? I don't think so, because there 
wasn't much push-back. The remaining pieces need to be addressed by 
someone with more core knowledge than I have. I think it's 90% complete 
other than making it thread-safe.

-- Scottchiefbaker

On 1/30/2026 5:43 AM, James E Keenan wrote:
> In three weeks we reach our first critical milestone on the way to a 
> production release of perl-5.44, currently scheduled for May 20 2026. 
> That milestone is the "Contentious changes freeze" release of 
> perl-5.43.8 on February 20.
>
> At this time it behooves all of us who are active in development of 
> the Perl core distribution -- particularly committers and members of 
> the Perl Steering Council -- to ask:
>
> * What changes from perl-5.42 have we already made in core -- and are 
> we convinced those changes are no longer "contentious"?
>
> * What changes have we scheduled or talked about for perl-5.44 but 
> have not really implemented (*e.g.,* the fatalization of "Changing 
> "use VERSION" while another "use VERSION" is in scope" 
> (https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/23624))?
>
> * What BBC damage have we sustained since the perl-5.43 dev cycle 
> began, and what have we discovered from earlier dev cycles?  What part 
> of this damage must be addressed by P5P, and what by CPAN 
> authors/moderators? What part of this damage needs to be addressed 
> before perl-5.44, and what are we prepared to live with?
>
> Speaking for myself, I would really like to see us release on our 
> target date and avoid deferring a production release until June or 
> July.  But that would require us to begin addressing the questions 
> above now rather than wait until April.
>