To put another spin on chromatic's words, consider 5.8.9 to be the end-of-life release of the 5.8 track. It's been good, it's served us well (5.8.0 was released in July 2002), but a number of deep architectural changes mean that new improvements can no longer be made whilst maintaining binary compatibility.

Binary compatibility means that the underlying C structs have kept the same layout for the past 6 years. Think adding an int to a struct would lead to a 2x speed improvement? Too bad. It would break the promise that a module with an XS component that was compiled on 5.8.3 would be able to be executed by a 5.8.8 interpreter with no ill effect.

What this means is that you could have compiled the latest version of Perl 6 years ago, compiled a suite of modules from CPAN at the same time, and then continued to upgrade only the perl interpreter, and all those CPAN modules with XS components would have continued to work unchanged.

But sooner or later someone comes along with a truly cool optimisation, such as Nicholas Clark's work on slimming down the core datatypes (scalars, arrays and hashes), Dave Mitchell rewriting the lexical and closure code, Yves Orton adding new features to the regexp engine, Robin Houston adding all sorts of new goodies, and the time comes when you just have to let go of the past.

And hence, 5.10, with all its shiny new goodness.

Nevertheless, there were a number of loose ends that needed to be tied up in the 5.8 track. Some of the new ideas that arose in the journey to 5.10 were able to be backported to to 5.8. Some people were sufficiently motivated to resolve certain 5.8 bugs, and it was only fair to get them out the door.

So consider this release a paying of debts. Just as there will never be a 5.6.3 release, it's safe to say that there will never be a 5.8.10 release.

With 5.8.9, all debts are paid, and the porters are free to concentrate on the 5.10 track. If you find a bug now in 5.8.whatever, you're out of luck. You might want to consider this the Last Great American Whale release. To quote Lou Reed: "It's like what my painter friend Donald said to me 'stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they're done'"