Suggestions for an interim perl upgrade?

[Alex Soares de Moura]

Hello,

I have a production server that needs badbly to have it's perl 
installation upgraded to perl 5.8.3 right now and I'd like to know if 
there's any best practice to do the upgrade without conflicting with 
it's port (and the portupgrade tool), when released.

Another concern regards to upgrading various perl dependent (also p5-*) 
ports with this manual perl 5.8.3 installation using portupgrade: does 
this work 100%? And when the official perl port is released, will the 
portupgrade be able to correctly handle the future upgrades?

Thank you,

Alex