Perl 5.40.4-RC1 is now available!

To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave.  "I shall
perish", said he, "I must perish in this deplorable folly.  Thus, thus,
and not otherwise, shall I be lost.  I dread the events of the future,
not in themselves, but in their results.  I shudder at the thought of
any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this
intolerable agitation of soul.  I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger,
except in its absolute effect--in terror.  In this unnerved, in this
pitiable, condition I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive
when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the
grim phantasm, FEAR."

  -- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (in "Tales of
     Mystery and Imagination")

We are pleased to announce the first release candidate of version 40.4,
the fourth maintenance release of version 40 of Perl 5.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.40.4-RC1 from your favourite
CPAN mirror or find it at:

  https://metacpan.org/release/SHAY/perl-5.40.4-RC1/

SHA256 digests for this release are:

  *perl-5.40.4-RC1.tar.gz:
  885a73714199f2d76d13beb4bf4bf521243f9cb7fd1255845464e8afeb96282b

  *perl-5.40.4-RC1.tar.xz:
  08e6d688f98a9bdc01a1e02b8fb2e1171ef96edc4aad0409be10f3a2cce16229

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.

***Please, please, please*** test your code against perl-5.40.4-RC1.
This is your last chance to point out any critical regressions before
v5.40.4 ships "for real," and we'd rather fix things for v5.40.4 than
for v5.40.5!

The final v5.40.4 is expected to ship on 29 March.

Steve Hay