Perl 5.40.5 is now available!

Of course, men who really want to camouflage themselves when getting up
to nefarious activities wear a grey business suit.  I think a primary
function of their sober attire is not just to look smart, but to be
invisible in the same way that burglars often wear hi-vis jackets to
pass as unremarkable 'workmen'.

  -- Grayson Perry, "The Descent of Man"

We are pleased to announce version 40.5, the fifth maintenance release
of version 40 of Perl 5.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.40.5 from your favourite CPAN
mirror or find it at:

  https://metacpan.org/release/SHAY/perl-5.40.5/

SHA256 digests for this release are:

  *perl-5.40.5.tar.gz
  09d926ae2d1b277c3bce62054c41da47c981380d719c41cf980b67945cc581ed

  *perl-5.40.5.tar.xz
  1fe6f825b487d26c35aa51a35f52fe494d4cfc77b8051f8b1ee3391bf0289bc6

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 5.40.5 represents approximately 4 months of development since Perl
5.40.4 and contains approximately 4,200 lines of changes across 130
files from 15 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
were approximately 2,000 lines of changes to 64 .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 5.40.5:

Aristotle Pagaltzis, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, David Mitchell, E.
Choroba, Eric Herman, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Leon Timmermans,
Paul Evans, Paul Marquess, Philippe Bruhat (BooK), Richard Leach, Steve
Hay, Thibault Duponchelle, Tony Cook.

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
2027.

Steve Hay