I noted with interest the Darwin hooks for perl-5.8 when they first
appeared in pkgsrc, but I didn't pay much attention because I had just
recently gone through the pain of upgrading to perl-5.6.1 on my
development box and on my package test and build box.

However I heard a rumour the other day that besides many other fixes,
perl-5.8 also improves performance back to 5.0 levels again.

So I'm taking a little closer look at 5.8 now, especially since I'm
noticing that Cricket's web CGI interface seems even slower (or at least
as slow) on my PPro-200 than it was on my old P-133 box.

I'm wondering if anyone has taken the chance to just forcibly delete
perl-5.6* without deleting any of the packages it needs and installing
5.8 in its place, (and maybe manually updating their /var/db/pkg to
point the old dependencies at the new package).  I did a quick read
through the NEWS file and didn't see anything that worried me too much
about compatability problems, but then I'm about as far from being a
perl guru as you can get.  I suppose I could try it and then just
re-install 5.6.1 if I have any problems, but I thought I'd ask first if
anyone else had any comments about potential compatability problems with
already installed packages (IIRC there's mention in the NEWS file of
some form of "binary incompatability" but I'm not sure what that means
in this context).

Also, is anyone other than the Darwin pkgsrc users running perl-5.8 on
NetBSD and if so can you speak to whether it's a better performer on
NetBSD (eg. i386 and sparc) than 5.6.1?

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
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