Perl 5.42.1 is now available!

  'There are worse crimes than murder,' said the small man in the grey
suit.  'And there are worse punishments than the electric chair.'
[...]
  'Civilization?' the little man questioned, as the bartender drew my
beer.  'What is it, anyway? It's a carefully cultivated myth.  We are
just savages living in upholstered caves.  Give any man sufficient
provocation and the barbarian will emerge.'

  -- Andrew Benedict, "The Wall-to-Wall Grave" (in "Alfred Hitchcock
     presents: Stories my mother never told me, Part One")

We are pleased to announce version 42.1, the first maintenance release
of version 42 of Perl 5.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.42.1 from your favourite CPAN
mirror or find it at:

  https://metacpan.org/release/SHAY/perl-5.42.1/

SHA256 digests for this release are:

  *perl-5.42.1.tar.gz
  6f84e6dc8cce97181d1c6aeeb552c13775c91ded3c6c73743c9211af87b16bf8

  *perl-5.42.1.tar.xz
  098c7f76e7a28443f6403610c7e339777905360c5225798fd142b8d33b05c6b4

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perldelta.pod" located
in the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web.

Perl 5.42.1 represents approximately 8 months of development since Perl
5.42.0 and contains approximately 7,200 lines of changes across 55 files
from 12 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
were approximately 1,700 lines of changes to 16 .pm, .t, .c and .h
files.

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant
community of users and developers.  The following people are known to
have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.42.1:

David Mitchell, Eric Herman, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Lukas
Mai, Max Maischein, Philippe Bruhat (BooK), Richard Leach, Steve Hay,
Thibault Duponchelle, Tony Cook, Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
generated from version control history.  In particular, it does not
include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN
modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN
community for helping Perl to flourish.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,
please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

The next major stable release of Perl should appear in the first half of
2026.

Steve Hay