Perl 5.40.2 is now available!

Now, since 1740, Prussia had been under the rule of its third king,
Frederick II, who was a member of the Hohenzollern family.  Known as
Frederick the Great, he was without doubt one of the most cultivated men
of his age.  He was on friendly terms with a number of Frenchmen who
preached the ideas of the Enlightenment in their writings, and he
himself wrote much on the subject in French.  For although he was king
of Prussia he scorned the German language and customs, which, as a
result of the Thirty Years War, were in a very poor state.  His aim and
his duty, as he saw it, was to make Prussia a model state and in so
doing demonstrate the value of the thinking of his friends in France.
He liked to say that he saw himself as the first servant of the servant:
the butler, as it were, rather than the owner.  And in that role he
concerned himself with every detail of his project of putting the new
ideas into practice.  One of the first things he did was to abolish the
barbaric practice of torture.  He also relieved the peasants of some of
the heavier duties to their landlords.  And he was always particularly
concerned that all his subjects, from the poorest to the mightiest,
should receive equal justice.  A rare thing in those days.

  -- E. H. Gombrich, trans. Caroline Mustill, "A Little History of the
     World"

We are astonished to announce version 40.2, the second maintenance
release of version 40 of Perl 5.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.40.2 from your favourite CPAN
mirror or find it at:

  https://metacpan.org/release/SHAY/perl-5.40.2/

SHA256 digests for this release are:

  *perl-5.40.2.tar.gz
  10d4647cfbb543a7f9ae3e5f6851ec49305232ea7621aed24c7cfbb0bef4b70d

  *perl-5.40.2.tar.xz
  0551c717458e703ef7972307ab19385edfa231198d88998df74e12226abf563b

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 5.40.2 represents approximately 3 months of development since Perl
5.40.1 and contains approximately 1,600 lines of changes across 37 files
from 7 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
were approximately 640 lines of changes to 5 .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 5.40.2:

Karl Williamson, Lukas Mai, Max Maischein, Paul Evans, Richard Leach,
Steve Hay, Thibault Duponchelle.

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
2025.

Steve Hay

• Perl 5.40.2 is now available! by Steve Hay via perl5-porters