Welcome to the beginnings of the Archive of perl/Changes. Contents are either broken, or just about to be. Use at your own risk. The Perl repository is managed using the Perforce SCM tool (see http://www.perforce.com/). You don't need Perforce to get at these files. You'll be in business if you have either rsync (preferable), or an ftp client that can do recursive downloads of only the files you don't already have (can be inefficient). If you're looking for something interactive where you can track specific changes or files in the repository, you may want to try this first: http://public.ActiveState.com/cgi-bin/perlbrowse The changes-all.gz file summarizes all the changes that have happened since the beginning of the repository in all the various branches of development. changes-latest.gz contains everything since the last public development release. When a new release happens, these files get put under a directory named after that release. The perl-current directory is the latest state of the mainline (the master branch from which development releases are made). The perl-current-diffs directory contains patches for each change entered into the master branch (aka "mainline") of the Perl repository since the last development release. Earlier diffs are under directories named after those earlier releases. The perl-5.6.x directory is the latest state of the 5.6 maintenance branch (the branch from which maintenance releases are made). The perl-5.6.x-diffs directory contains patches for each change entered into the 5.6.x branch of the Perl repository since the last maintenance release. Earlier diffs are under directories named after those earlier releases. All the perl-* directories are also served via rsync. You can use the following commands to update to the latest state in these directories: rsync -avz rsync://ftp.linux.activestate.com/perl-current/ current rsync -avz rsync://ftp.linux.activestate.com/perl-current-diffs/ current-diffs rsync -avz rsync://ftp.linux.activestate.com/perl-5.6.x/ 5.6.x rsync -avz rsync://ftp.linux.activestate.com/perl-5.6.x-diffs/ 5.6.x-diffs If you are applying these patches, you'll need to make sure you have GNU patch v2.5 or later and the latest release against which the diffs are made. Some files in the perl distribution have carriage-returns by design. You'll need to remove them before you you can apply the patches. % find -name \* -print | xargs perl -pi -e 's/\r$//' % patch -p1 -N < diffs/3479 % patch -p1 -N < diffs/3480 [..etc..] Note that you are completely and severely on your own if you are using any of this. Subscribing to the perl5-porters list is a good idea if you don't mind hundreds of messages and a few flames mixed in with occasional wisdom on whatever happens to be the very latest Perl perversion. See http://www.perl.org/ for where that is. Enjoy! Gurusamy Sarathy gsar@ActiveState.com