I've upgraded to 5.8.0 on Red Hat 7.3 and it went flawlessly - but I built it from the tarball I downloaded from perl.com. I don't use RPMs for stuff like Perl because of previous bad experiences with files ending up in what I consider to be non-standard locations. Is a source RPM the same as the tarball?

BTW, my Red hat 7.1 box is still running Perl 5.6.1 because I was worried that the upgrade wouldn't go smoothly and I don't have time right now to fix it if things go horribly wrong. At this point I figure I'll probably just upgrade to the latest Red Hat 8.x which comes with Perl 5.8.0.