This is Debian's prepackaged version of Larry Wall's wonderful
interpreted scripting language Perl version 5.  For more information
about Perl, see Usenet's comp.lang.perl.* newsgroups.

Perl is a language that combines some of the features of C, sed, awk
and shell.  See the manual page for more hype.  There are many Nutshell
Handbooks published by O'Reilly & Assoc.  See pod/perlbook.pod
for more information.

This package was put together by Darren Stalder <torin@daft.com> from
sources at http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/5.0/perl5.005_03.tar.gz.

Previous maintainers of this package are Ray Dassen
<jdassen@WI.LeidenUniv.NL>, Carl Streeter <streeter@cae.wisc.edu>, and
Robert Sanders <Robert.Sanders@linux.org>.

Program Copyright (c) 1989-1999  Larry Wall    All rights reserved.

Modifications for Debian Copyright (c) 1995-1999 Carl Streeter, Ray
Dassen, Darren Stalder and released under the same terms as Perl.

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of either:

a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any
later version, or

b) the "Artistic License" which comes with Debian.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See either
    the GNU General Public License or the Artistic License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the Artistic License with this
    Kit, in the file /usr/share/common-licenses/Artistic.  If not, I'll
    be glad to provide one.

    You should also have received a copy of the GNU General Public
    License along with this system, in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL;
    if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place
    - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

    For those of you that choose to use the GNU General Public License,
    my interpretation of the GNU General Public License is that no Perl
    script falls under the terms of the GPL unless you explicitly put
    said script under the terms of the GPL yourself.  Furthermore, any
    object code linked with perl does not automatically fall under the
    terms of the GPL, provided such object code only adds definitions
    of subroutines and variables, and does not otherwise impair the
    resulting interpreter from executing any standard Perl script.  I
    consider linking in C subroutines in this manner to be the moral
    equivalent of defining subroutines in the Perl language itself.  You
    may sell such an object file as proprietary provided that you provide
    or offer to provide the Perl source, as specified by the GNU General
    Public License.  (This is merely an alternate way of specifying input
    to the program.)  You may also sell a binary produced by the dumping of
    a running Perl script that belongs to you, provided that you provide or
    offer to provide the Perl source as specified by the GPL.  (The
    fact that a Perl interpreter and your code are in the same binary file
    is, in this case, a form of mere aggregation.)  This is my interpretation
    of the GPL.  If you still have concerns or difficulties understanding
    my intent, feel free to contact me.  Of course, the Artistic License
    spells all this out for your protection, so you may prefer to use that.