Perl 5.42.2 is now available!

I had swooned; but still will not say that all of consciousness was
lost.  What of it there remained I will not attempt to define, or even
to describe; yet all was not lost.  In the deepest slumber--no!  In
delirium--no!  In a swoon--no!  In death--no! even in the grave all is
not lost.  Else there is no immortality for man.

  -- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Pit and the Pendulum" (in "Tales of Mystery
     and Imagination")

We are pleased to announce version 42.2, the second maintenance release
of version 42 of Perl 5.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.42.2 from your favourite CPAN
mirror or find it at:

  https://metacpan.org/release/SHAY/perl-5.42.2/

SHA256 digests for this release are:

  *perl-5.42.2.tar.gz
  9384e8deb75b7b1695e5637971b752281aaecd025a3d5d4734d33c1d0adfee47

  *perl-5.42.2.tar.xz
  0a585eeb9e363c0f80482ddb3571625250c2c86aeb408853e8ea50805cfb14bb

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 5.42.2 represents approximately 3 weeks of development since Perl
5.42.1 and contains approximately 2,900 lines of changes across 57 files
from 6 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
were approximately 1,900 lines of changes to 23 .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 5.42.2:

Eric Herman, James E Keenan, Olaf Alders, Paul Marquess, Richard Leach,
Steve Hay.

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