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.

In reply to Re: Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0? by graff
in thread Upgrade time: 5.6.1 or 5.8.0? by FoxtrotUniform

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