PSC #218 2026-03-16

All three of us attended this long meeting covering quite a bit ground:

- CVE-2026-3381 obliges us to cut a 5.42.2 point release with an updated
  Compress::Raw::Zlib.

- We accepted Phillipe’s and Eric’s offer to handle the last dev
  releases of the cycle.

- Olaf Alders requested more explicit EOL notices and has updated
  `perlpolicy.pod` and the release manager guide accordingly. We agreed
  that the release announcement mails for the final dev release and the
  stable release should also contain a brief note about the perl version
  which is falling out of support, and filed [an issue to make this happen][1].

- We sent mail to kick off the voting process for some new core team
  member candidates.

- We discussed the state of Devel::PPPort. It has been outdated for some
  time and needs to be unstuck.

- We would like to get `customize.dat` down to the only entry that
  cannot be removed (for `version.pm`). We will try to coordinate with
  maintainers.

- We noticed that we missed the deprecation of multiple `use VERSION`
  declarations in the same scope, which was supposed to be fatalized in
  5.44. It is too late now to do that in this dev cycle, so the warning
  will have to change to 5.46 and the deprecation revisited next cycle.

- Further on the topic of overlooked deprecations, we considered how to
  prevent this from continuing to happen. We decided that some kind of
  documentation of recurring PSC obligations during a cycle is needed,
  which would also include things like the contentious changes freeze
  and release blocker triage.

- There was not much time left for release blocker triage, so we only
  did a little, which surfaced no candidate blockers so far. (A few
  already-definite blockers have been spotted and marked outside of
  triage.)

[1]: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/24291

https://blogs.perl.org/users/psc/2026/03/this-week-in-psc-218-2026-03-16.html