Parrot 5.4.0 "Austin Parrot" Released!

[Bruce Gray]

    Jimi Hendrix, deceased, drugs.
    Janis Joplin, deceased, alcohol.
    Mama Cass, deceased, ham sandwich.
        -- Austin Powers (making a list of friends from the Summer of Love)

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 5.4.0, also known
as "Austin Parrot".  Parrot (http://parrot.org/) is a virtual machine aimed
at running all dynamic languages, and currently focusing on Perl 6.

Parrot 5.4.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site
(ftp://ftp.parrot.org/pub/parrot/releases/devel/5.4.0/), or by following the
download instructions at http://parrot.org/download.  For those who would like
to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Git to
retrieve the source code to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 5.4.0 News:
    - Core
        + Implemented the coth() and acot() math functions.
        + Fixed chomp to only trim a newline when it ends the string. [GH #958]
        + Added readlink() and Parrot_file_readlink(), with tests. [GH #967]
    - Build
        + Parrot now detects the CPU model on Linux systems, as well as
          detecting more CPU models on BSD, Cygwin, Solaris, Win32, and Darwin.
          ARM v7 is also now recognized. [GH #962]
    - Documentation
        + Threads examples now have proper POD sections and useful descriptions
          with links to references.
        + Added main description for Task PMC.
        + Added descriptions to trig methods in Float PMC.
    - Tests
        + Added improved test coverage targets "cover_new" and "fullcover_new".
        + Improved tests for acot(), coth(), acot() math functions.
        + Added tests for options passed to debugger.
        + Updated native PBC test files for string, number, and integer,
          which resolved 11 TODOs in the test suite. [GH #959]
        + Fixed test for the auto/arch config step.
    - Release process
        + Added message digests to crow.pir.
        + Added in release.json: "release.type" can be "devel" or "supported".
        + Refactored common code to sub in auto_release.pl.
    - Community
        + Parrot is part of the Hackathon at YAPC::NA::2013, in Austin, TX, USA!
            http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/wiki?node=Hackathons
        + Parrot has been accepted to Google Summer of Code 2013!
        + Currently there are two high-quality proposals being worked on:
            https://gist.github.com/sa1/5468408        - parrot-libgit2
            https://gist.github.com/denisboyun/5472762 - App::Parrot::Create


The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are:
4e37686911b446f5e5f2c0aa62138988ba0c411d2c5e2ba231d1a3421a85ad10 parrot-5.4.0.tar.gz
91d0e46fe3ef08e692e80756f26ee0e7311fe58e49d6c31f3f5180d4eb475696 parrot-5.4.0.tar.bz2

Many thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors
for supporting this project.  Our next scheduled release is 18 Jun 2013.

Enjoy!