Re: Are we on track to release v5.44 in May?

On 3/17/26 13:07, Scott Baker wrote:
> We're officially half way through March now, and tt would be nice to hit 
> our release target if May.
> 
> Are we in a good place to hit that target?

Yes, we are.  This weekend, for example, perl-5.43.9 will be released. 
That will mark "User-visible changes to correctly functioning programs 
freeze."

However, in the dozen or so years I've been paying close attention to 
our annual production releases, the period between April 20 and May 20 
is where we are likely to get tripped up.  The April 20 release will be 
"Full program freeze."  At that point the person doing the annual 
production release (formerly the pumpking; now IIUC a member of the Perl 
Steering Council or their designee) should begin preparing Release 
Candidate (RC) releases.

Now, I have to admit that I've never been clear as to what the 
difference is supposed to be between how we test a monthly dev release 
versus an RC release.  In principle an RC release ought to be much more 
thoroughly tested than a monthly dev release, but I've never seen clear 
evidence that that's what happens.  I *suspect* -- or *would hope* -- 
that the "Perl maintainers" for certain software distributions do more 
intensive testing of the release candidate on their own software, and in 
some years we've actually gotten fresh bug reports on RC releases from 
the Debian and RedHat Perl maintainers.  But I doubt that happens 
*systematically* across, say, all Linux and BSD distributions.

The other place where we can slip up after April 20 is ... Life Happens 
and the releasor has a personal crisis that we don't find out about 
until sometime in June.

If you have darkpan code in production that you can test against an RC 
release, please do so!

My impression is that the current PSC is more on top of this year's 
production release than previous PSCs.  So, assuming we start doing RC 
releases by the first of May and we are getting real feedback on those 
releases, we have a shot at an on-time (May 20) release.

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan