> After banging my head against this for two evenings I decided I have to
> drop it and find someone else with better skills at this level or experience
> with debuging the culprit...
> 
> Pkgsrc switched to perl 5.8.x as the default perl. This is fine, but 
> unfortunately on sparc64 this perl fails lots of it's self tests - while the
> 5.6.x one did manage to succeed nearly all of them (some are destined to
> lose in a pkgsrc environment).
> 
> This starts with very basic things like
> 
>   print int(4.7);
> 
> printing "5" instead of "4". More failure in the "pack" tests etc. and ends
> in an endless loop somewhere in the bignum stuff. Or maybe I'm just not
> patient enough.

If you could do `make test_harness`, that'd be more illuminating; that
provides more detail. The problems sound vaguely akin to those I had
when porting perl to BeOS - namely, it wasn't promoting scalars properly
from single precision (IV) to double precision (NV) and back. (`perldoc
perlguts` for more on those datatypes.)