Perl 5's source code is no longer locked into the odious proprietary Perforce repository where it's been hosted for years. It's now hosted in the git distributed version control system. This is a huge win. [The announcement](http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/22/0830205) lists a number of benefits: - With a public repository and Git's extensive support for distributed and offline work, working on Perl 5's source becomes easier for everyone involved. - Because Git is open source, all developers now have equal access to the tools required to work on Perl's codebase. - Core committers have less administrative work to do when integrating contributed changes. - Developers outside the core team can more easily work on experimental changes to Perl before proposing them for inclusion in the next release. - A vast array of improved repository and change analysis tools are now available to Perl's developers. - The new Git repository includes every version of Perl 5 ever released, as well as every revision made during development. Before this move, if you wanted to submit a patch to Perl 5, you had to submit the patch against bleadperl, the main development branch, which was an always moving target. The repository wasn't directly available, so you had to either keep your own repository that got updated with patches as they were applied, or just deal with your local changes getting stomped on. Now, that's all over. It's butt simple to get the Perl source:
$ sudo yum install git
(Your package manager may vary)
$ git clone git://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git
(Time passes as much downloading happens)
$ ls
AUTHORS       configure.com    perl.h
Artistic      configure.gnu*   perl_keyword.pl
Changes       cop.h            perlapi.c
That's it. Now you have a copy of everything, and can make patches much more easily. Thanks to Sam Vilain and everyone else involved in this huge move.