Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0?

FoxtrotUniform has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0? by LD2 (Curate) on Feb 19, 2003 at 23:31 UTC
here's a link with a few comments that may give you an idea... here's another one.. for more information.. check out Super Search.	[reply]
Re: Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0? by graff (Chancellor) on Feb 20, 2003 at 01:37 UTC
From my own limited knowledge, I gather that 5.8.0 might break a few things involved with handling binary or "non-ascii" data content; some system setups with non-U.S./English locale settings may be especially prone to this trouble, because 5.8.0 would apparently use the locale info to "assume" that data files should be expected to contain unicode characters. (I believe this will be fixed in 5.8.1, so that no such assumption is made -- see this thread on the perl-unicode mailing list for details.) A few recent SoPW posts have also come up involving the "re-interpretation" of non-ascii character data within perl scripts as "invalid utf8" byte sequences, but the workaround is easy ("no utf8"). Apart from these somewhat limited issues, I haven't run across any problems -- I've had 5.8.0 on my personal linux box for a few months now, with no problems. The PerlIO stuff is awesome, and I wouldn't want to go back.	[reply]
Re^2: Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0? by Coruscate (Sexton) on Feb 20, 2003 at 06:31 UTC
/me nods. In my case, I got into Redhat 8.0 for an operating system (yep, I did it and spent some time figuring out that /etc/sysconfig/i18n contained the nasty lines that (more or less?) enabled UTF-8 encoding system-wide). Man pages look funny and tossed up with UTF-8, and many perl modules complained. I no longer have any problems, now that I nullified the utf-8 language settings. :) If the above content is missing any vital points or you feel that any of the information is misleading, incorrect or irrelevant, please feel free to downvote the post. At the same time, reply to this node or /msg me to tell me what is wrong with the post, so that I may update the node to the best of my ability. If you do not inform me as to why the post deserved a downvote, your vote does not have any significance and will be disregarded.	[reply]
Re: Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0? by joe++ (Friar) on Feb 20, 2003 at 10:08 UTC
If perldelta is too much to grok at this time, you can start with the highlights from What's new in Perl 5.8.0 (perl.com). The article contains many pointers for further reading on specific subjects. HTH! -- Cheers, Joe	[reply]
Re: Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0? by physi (Friar) on Feb 19, 2003 at 23:35 UTC
I'm not sure, but I read you've had to reinstall/recompile all the modules again in 5.8.0. So if you're planning to do a complete install with all the modules you need, try use 5.8.0. I did that on my web-box and all work's fine up to now ;-) Anyway I'm not sure if 5.005 modules at least are compatible to 5.6.1 !? ----------------------------------- --the good, the bad and the physi-- -----------------------------------	[reply]
Re: Re: Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0? by Cabrion (Friar) on Feb 20, 2003 at 00:27 UTC
You need to recompile XS modules in either case. The CPAN module has some utilites to take care of that. Even so I had to compile/install some things outside of the CPAN shell before I got things to the point that CPAN's tools would work. If it's a hobby box, I'd say go for 5.8.0 it's been mighty stable for me, and it has some nifty new features.	[reply]