For an overview of what's changed in this release, see pod/perldelta.pod.

For the details of changes in previous releases, see the individual
perlNNNdelta.pod files. For example, pod/perl588delta.pod describes the
changes between versions 5.8.7 and 5.8.8.

For a list of contributors to perl, see AUTHORS.

If you need a detailed commit history (i.e. descriptions of each
individual commit),  you can view the git version control history online
at http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git (follow the 'shortlog' link beside
the relevant tag). Or, you can download a copy of the git repository and
then run a command like 

    git log --name-status perl-5.10.0..perl-5.11.0

to view all the changes between 5.10.0 and 5.11.0.

See pod/perlrepository.pod for more details on using git and accessing the
commit history.

In perl releases prior to 2009, the source tarball included a collection
of Changes files that listed the individual commits that had gone into
each release. Since these files had become very large, and since the
same information is now freely available online, it was decided to remove
them from subsequent releases.

If you need access to these removed files, then they can be be found most
recently in the 5.8.9 and 5.10.0 tarballs, at

    http://www.cpan.org/src/perl-5.8.9.tar.gz 
    http://www.cpan.org/src/perl-5.10.0.tar.gz

The contents of the files in question can mostly be regenerated using git
commands. The following table shows the equivalents. Note that the files
prior to Changes5.005 were not simple lists of commits, so can't be
recreated just by running the git command. As it happens, even the latter
ones are not exact equivalents. This is due to a combination of errors in
the original Changes files, and "impedance mismatches" when the previous
version control data was imported into git in December 2008.

For example, the Changes5.005 file includes 206 spurious entries from the
maint5.004 Perforce branch.

Running the following command with the range argument shown in the table
will produce *approximately* the same list of changes in the specified
file shown from the listed tarball.

    git log --name-status <range>

  file           tarball  <range> argument to 'git log'
  ------------   ------   --------------------------------
  Changes5.000   Either   N/A
  Changes5.001   Either   perl-5.000..perl-5.001
  Changes5.002   Either   perl-5.001..perl-5.002
  Changes5.003   Either   perl-5.002..perl-5.003
  Changes5.004   Either   perl-5.003..perl-5.004
  Changes5.005   Either   perl-5.004..perl-5.005_03
  Changes5.6     Either   perl-5.005_03..perl-5.6.0
  Changes5.8     Either   perl-5.6.0..perl-5.8.0
  Changes5.8.1   5.8.9    perl-5.8.0..perl-5.8.1 ^1ede746b
  Changes5.8.2   5.8.9    perl-5.8.1..perl-5.8.2
  Changes5.8.3   5.8.9    perl-5.8.2..perl-5.8.3
  Changes5.8.4   5.8.9    perl-5.8.3..perl-5.8.4
  Changes5.8.5   5.8.9    perl-5.8.4..perl-5.8.5 ^3a81978b
  Changes5.8.6   5.8.9    perl-5.8.5..perl-5.8.6 ^498d59dd
  Changes5.8.7   5.8.9    perl-5.8.6..perl-5.8.7
  Changes5.8.8   5.8.9    perl-5.8.7..perl-5.8.8
  Changes        5.8.9    perl-5.8.8..perl-5.8.9
  Changes        5.10.0   perl-5.8.0..perl-5.10.0
