Straightening out perl

[Scott I. Remick]

Maybe this belongs in the -ports list... I dunno. Anyways, saw a few
messages recently that prompted me to check my perl situation:

su-2.05b# pkg_info | grep perl-
perl-5.6.1_15       Practical Extraction and Report Language
perl-5.8.2_2        Practical Extraction and Report Language

And wouldn't you know, everything that depends on perl depends on 5.6
currently. Yet it seems I should be ditching 5.6 and using 5.8.2, from
what I read. So I'm wondering how to best straighten this out.

As things stand now, "use.perl port" sticks me with 5.6. And I can't use
portupgrade to fix this because alas, both versions are installed from
ports (ports/perl5 and ports/perl5.8) and are considered "separate" and
individually up-to-date.

One option would be to do a pkg_delete -f on 5.6 then use portdb -F to fix
the dependencies. Not sure if that's enough or if I need to rebuild. And
if I need to rebuild the dependencies, how could I easily handle the list
in one-pass? Right now it all depends on 5.6 which I'd be deleting. I
could whack 5.6, repoint all dependencies to 5.8, then tell it to forcibly
rebuild everything that depends on 5.8... but I don't know if this is the
right thing to do.

Or maybe I'm wrong and I should be keeping 5.6 because 5.8.2 will destroy
things horribly and cause much breakage and woe.

Eh. Advice? This seems to be a FAQ but searching/reading through the last
several months of messages didn't reveal a definitive answer. Thanks!