Add draft 2013.04 announcement.

3 files changed, 110 insertions, 7 deletions

diff --git a/docs/announce/2013.04.md b/docs/announce/2013.04.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e5ba1bf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/announce/2013.04.md
@@ -0,0 +1,105 @@
+# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2013.04
+
+## A useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6
+
+On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to
+announce the April 2013 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
+distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the April 2013 release is
+available from <http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/>. A Windows .MSI
+version of Rakudo star will usually appear in the downloads area
+shortly after the tarball release.
+
+In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language
+("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as
+"Rakudo Perl".  This Star release includes [release 2013.04] of the
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 5.3.0 of the [Parrot Virtual
+Machine], plus various modules, documentation, and other resources
+collected from the Perl 6 community.
+
+[release 2013.04]:
+    https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2013.04.md
+[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
+[Parrot Virtual Machine]: http://parrot.org
+
+Some of the new features added to this release include:
+
+* Rakudo warns when pure expressions are used in sink context
+* .substr(...) now correctly accepts whatever-star closures
+* Implemented shellwords postcircumfix (%h<< $x 'foo bar' >>)
+* Defining operators spelled like the empty string is now illegal
+* Array interpolations now properly do LTM
+* Autothread "none" and "all" junctions before "any" and "one"
+* Helpful error if you write "else if"/"elif" instead of "elsif"
+* Throw exception if a Range is used as a Range endpoint
+* Corrected argument order in IO.seek
+* wrap low level VM objects in ForeignCode, allowing perl6 OO calls on them
+* for loops are eager again
+* add link and symlink to IO
+* add Capture.Bool()
+* improvements to DUMP()
+* various optimizations in the optimizer and the runtime
+* smartmatch against list now supports Whatever wildcards
+
+This release also contains a range of bug fixes, improvements to error
+reporting and better failure modes.
+
+The following features have been deprecated or modified from previous
+releases due to changes in the Perl 6 specification, and are planned
+to be removed or changed as follows:
+
+  * postcircumfix:`<[ ]>` and postcircumfix:`<{ }>` will become
+    multi-subs rather than multi-methods. Both at_pos and at_key will
+    remain methods.
+
+  * Unary hyper ops currently descend into nested arrays and hashes.
+    This will change to make them equivalent to a one-level map.
+
+  * The Str.ucfirst builtin is deprecated; it will be replaced by
+    Str.tc.
+
+  * Leading whitespace in rules and under :sigspace will no longer be
+    converted to `<.ws>`.  For existing regexes that expect this
+    conversion, add a `<?>` in front of leading whitespace to make it
+    meta again.
+
+  * The ?-quantifier on captures in regexes currently binds the
+    capture slot to a List containing either zero or one Match
+    objects; i.e., it is equivalent to "`** 0..1`".  In the future,
+    the ?-quantifier will bind the slot directly to a captured Match
+    or to Nil.  Existing code can manage the transition by changing
+    existing ?-quantifiers to use "`** 0..1`", which will continue to
+    return a List of matches.
+
+  * The result of failed matches will be Nil instead of a Match
+    object returning boolean False.
+
+There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet
+handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases.
+Some of the not-quite-there features include:
+
+  * advanced macros
+  * threads and concurrency
+  * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints
+  * interactive readline that understands Unicode
+  * non-blocking I/O
+  * much of Synopsis 9
+
+There is an online resource at <http://perl6.org/compilers/features>
+that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo and
+other Perl 6 implementations.
+
+In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
+programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many
+that we've missed.  Bug reports about missing and broken features are
+welcomed at <rakudobug@perl.org>.
+
+See <http://perl6.org/> for links to much more information about
+Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference
+materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources.  A
+draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in
+the release tarball.
+
+The development team thanks all of the contributors and sponsors for
+making Rakudo Star possible.  If you would like to contribute, see
+<http://rakudo.org/how-to-help>, ask on the <perl6-compiler@perl.org>
+mailing list, or join us on IRC \#perl6 on freenode.
diff --git a/tools/star/Makefile b/tools/star/Makefile
index 6dd6487..1db34b9 100644
--- a/tools/star/Makefile
+++ b/tools/star/Makefile
@@ -1,7 +1,6 @@
-RAKUDO_VER  = 2013.02.1
-NQP_VER     = 2013.02.1
-PARROT_VER  = 4.10.0
-PARROT_REL  = devel/$(PARROT_VER)
+RAKUDO_VER  = 2013.04
+NQP_VER     = 2013.04
+PARROT_VER  = 5.2.0
 
 STAR_REL    = rakudo-star-$(VERSION)
 STAR_TGZ    = $(STAR_REL).tar.gz
@@ -15,7 +14,7 @@ NQP_TGZ    = nqp-$(NQP_VER).tar.gz
 NQP_URL    = http://rakudo.org/downloads/nqp/$(NQP_TGZ)
 NQP_SRC    = $(SRC_DIR)/$(NQP_TGZ)
 PARROT_TGZ = parrot-$(PARROT_VER).tar.gz
-PARROT_URL = http://ftp.parrot.org/releases/$(PARROT_REL)/$(PARROT_TGZ)
+PARROT_URL = http://ftp.parrot.org/releases/all/$(PARROT_VER)/$(PARROT_TGZ)
 PARROT_SRC = $(SRC_DIR)/$(PARROT_TGZ)
 
 PERL   = perl
diff --git a/tools/star/release-guide.pod b/tools/star/release-guide.pod
index eca77d6..a109e02 100644
--- a/tools/star/release-guide.pod
+++ b/tools/star/release-guide.pod
@@ -27,8 +27,7 @@ Clone the git@github.com:rakudo/star repository.
 
 Change to the star repository directory, and edit the first three
 lines of tools/star/Makefile to indicate the desired releases of
-Rakudo, NQP, and Parrot to use.  Also change PARROT_REL to be
-"supported" or "devel" depending on the type of Parrot release.
+Rakudo, NQP, and Parrot to use.  
 
   $ cd star
   $ vi tools/star/Makefile