Upgrading to 8.1; Perl; and libgcrypt

[J. Altman]

Greetings...

I am looking at upgrading to 8.1 from 8.0 on an AMD64.

As you know, Perl is now at 5.12 and requires a recursive dependency
rebuild; and so does libgcrypt.

This seems to be a rather extensive pair of updates.

Perl, while (IIRC) it is in the base system, is being reported as
needing an upgrade via  portversion | grep '<'. I seem to recall
something that makes me think I am wrong here...that it's not in the
base system, maybe?

Is libgcrypt, perhaps, part of the base system? I suspect not.

I've read http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/relnotes.html and
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/relnotes-detailed.html and Perl
5.12 is not mentioned as a part of 8.1.

Does this mean that an upgrade via /usr/src will not upgrade Perl to
5.12? I suspect it does mean that Perl will not be upgraded from 5.10;
but I do hope that Perl will be upgraded to 5.12 via an update to
/usr/src.

I also can't remember if a recursive rebuild of all ports after an
upgrade across releases was ever recommended. For some reason, I think
I read that somewhere.

My point with these questions is to move toward 8.1 in the most
economical manner.

Thanks for any help, and best regards,

Joe