Upgrading perl

[Ivan Voras]

The situation is: running 4-stable, with perl 5.6 from ports, with lots 
of packages which depend on it. Now I need to install an application 
that requires perl5.8!

Is there a way to switch over to 5.8 without breaking everything? I'm 
asking this because I see two different ports in the tree: perl5, which 
installs 5.6 and perl5.8 which apparently has what I need, but 
portupgrade doesn't understand it (tries to upgrade 5.6 to a newer port 
revision).

I tried installing the perl5.8 port (which gets me three versions of 
perl installed, *sigh*), but existing applications couldn't find needed 
modules.

-- 
What part of "Ph'nglui mglw'nath Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" don't
you understand?