Initial draft of 2009-09 release announcement.

docs/announce/2009-09

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+Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #21 ("XXX")
+
+On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce
+the September 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #21 "XXX".
+Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].
+The tarball for the September 2009 release is available from
+http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .
+
+Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the
+frequent addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we continue
+to recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain
+the latest source directly from the main repository at github.
+More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo .
+
+Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named
+after a Perl Mongers group.  September 2009 is code named "XXX" for the
+[...add some useful information about XXX group here...]
+
+Since the 2009-08 release, Rakudo Perl builds from an "installed
+Parrot" instead of using Parrot's build tree.  This release of Rakudo
+requires Parrot 1.6.0.  For the latest information on building and
+using Rakudo Perl, see the README file section titled "Building and
+invoking Rakudo".  (Quick note: the "--gen-parrot" option still
+automatically downloads and builds Parrot as before, if you prefer
+that approach.)
+
+Also, unlike previous versions of Rakudo Perl, the "perl6"
+(or "perl6.exe") executables only work when invoked from the
+Rakudo root directory until a "make install" is performed.
+Running "make install" will install Rakudo and its libraries
+into the Parrot installation that was used to build it, and then
+the executables will work when invoked from any directory.
+
+Some of the specific major changes and improvements occuring
+with this release include:
+
+* Rakudo is now passing XXX spectests, an increase of XXX
+  passing tests since the August 2009 release.  With this release
+  Rakudo is now passing XX.XX% of the available spectest suite.
+
+* Rakudo now supports the rational (Rat) data type.
+
+* Rakudo now supports overloading of many of the builtin operators.
+
+* ...
+
+Since the Perl 6 specification is still in flux, some deprecated features
+will be removed from Rakudo. Prominently among those are:
+
+ * '=$handle' is deprecated in favor of '$handle.get' (one line)
+   and '$handle.lines' (all lines).
+
+ * 'int $obj' is deprecated in favor of '$obj.Int'.
+
+The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for
+making Rakudo Perl possible.  If you would like to contribute,
+see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org
+mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode.
+
+The next release of Rakudo (#22) is scheduled for October 22, 2009.
+A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 is
+available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file.  In general, Rakudo
+development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each
+Parrot monthly release.  Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.
+
+Have fun!
+
+References:
+[1]  Parrot, http://parrot.org/
+[2]  Rakudo Star, http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39411