initial release announcement

docs/announce/2011.07

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+    Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler development release #43 ("<PM>")
+
+On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce the
+July 2011 release of Rakudo Perl #43 "<PM>".  Rakudo is an 
+implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see 
+<http://www.parrot.org>). The tarball for the June 2011 release
+is available from <http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads>.
+
+Please note: This announcement is not for the Rakudo Star distribution --
+it's announcing a new release of the compiler only.  For the latest
+Rakudo Star release, see <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>.
+
+The Rakudo Perl compiler follows a monthly release cycle, with each release
+named after a Perl Mongers group. The June 2011 release is code named
+"<PM>".
+
+Browsing the change log below, it might appear as though not much
+Rakudo development is taking place.  Nearly all of the development
+activity is now occurring in the "nom" 
+branch of the Rakudo repository (over 1200 commits since the 2011.05
+release).  This new branch will shortly become the mainline branch
+from which monthly releases are made, and already contains many
+important bugfixes and performance improvements.
+
+Some of the specific changes and improvements occurring in the
+master branch with this release include:
+
+* Fix bug in exponentation of negative numbers
+* Fix build on systems with little RAM
+
+For a more detailed list of changes, see "docs/ChangeLog".
+
+The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for
+making Rakudo Perl possible, as well as those people who worked on 
+Parrot, the Perl 6 test suite and the specification.
+
+The following people contributed to this release:
+
+Moritz Lenz, Patrick R. Michaud, atrodo, Solomon Foster, bacek and others.
+
+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 regular release of Rakudo (#44) is scheduled for August 18, 2011.
+See http://rakudo.org/2011/07/19/upcoming-rakudo-releases/ for more details.
+A list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2011 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.