It's a quality of the Perl 5.8 stable branch that it's pretty darned stable. This is mainly due to the work put in by Nicholas Clark bringing the release management process under control.

There's not been much functionality change between 5.8.3 and 5.8.8 - check the perldelta documents, and you'll find this is in areas not affecting your application - ymmv. The exception is in the handling of UTF-8; You may have issues if you need this functionality.