Hmmm.... I'd actually disagree with that advice... in a hopefully constructive manner :-)

Note: I am not saying "don't use 5.8". I'm happily using 5.8 on my laptop at the moment! It''s fluffy and nice. It's been the most pain-free upgrade of perl ever for me. I have it running on a couple of dev boxes and use it daily.

However....

5.8 will also have bugs (maybe less than 5.6.1 :-). At the moment, most of them are unknown and undocumented.

While perl 5.6.1 has bugs, many (possibly even most) are known and documented.

When it comes to a production server that people depend on I will pick more-known-bugs over less-unknown-bugs any day of the week --- unless the known-bug in question is a significant barrier to developing/maintaining/running the server in question.

Hopefully that makes some vague sort of sense.