Hi, I'm the current Perl development leader.  The next major
release is going to be 5.8.0, and we are getting pretty close to it.
I would appreciate if people on various NetBSD platforms could try
out the below development snapshot:

       http://www.iki.fi/jhi/perl@16189.tgz
       http://www.iki.fi/jhi/perl@16189.tbz

       ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/snap/perl@16189.tgz
       ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/snap/perl@16189.tbz

       ftp.funet.fi::perlsnap (rsync)

The Perl development team routinely tests on FreeBSD so I'm not
expecting any major problems on NetBSD, but I would get a warm fuzzy
feeling if I knew for certain.  Results from non-Intel platforms would
be really nice.

Note that at some point early this year I did grab the NetBSD pkgsrc
patches for Perl, and backported most of them.  What I didn't backport
were the NetBSD-installation specific patches.  See the changes file
at about change #13560.

To test:

- download
- unpack (unpacks to perl/)
- cd perl && sh Configure -des -Dusedevel
- make all test

If errors, to get a more detailed report:

- cd t && ./perl harness

If feeling adventurous:

- rm config.sh; sh Configure -des -Dusedevel -Duse64bitint; make all test
- rm config.sh; sh Configure -des -Dusedevel -Duseithreads; make all test

The first one if you have a 64-bit CPU, the second one if you have
the GNU pth ( http://www.gnu.org/software/pth/pth.html, I think it
is available in pkgsrc) installed.  The "ithreads" is a new thread
model that's showing much better promise than Perl's old thread model,
if you have had the misfortune of trying that.

The -Dusedevel is a safety hatch that stops people from inadvertently
using a development snapshot.  When we enter the Release Candidates,
the -Dusedevel will be removed.

Another safety hatch is that even if you say "make install" the
binaries will be installed with "5.7.3" prefix.  This will cause
a few warnings of the kind "pod2man not found" e.g. from the CPAN.pm
module.  Also this will be lifted when RCs come out.

-- 
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
        # There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
        # It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen