To use.perl port or not?

[Keith Beattie]

Hi all,

I recently installed the perl-5.8.2_5 port and ran 'use.perl port' to make
that new perl the default system perl. I did several other upgrades at about 
the same time and since then: kernel cvsup and rebuild to 4.9-RELEASE-p4, and
weekly cvsup to update my installed ports.

It seemed after those upgrades 'mozilla related' apps because quite unstable:
specifically mozilla mail and browser, thunderbird, firefox, epiphany and
openoffice all crashing without a core file or any log message that I could
find.  I tried a pkg_deinstall & portinstall of mozilla but that didn't help. 
Today I was doing a routine upgrade of epiphany and it failed in configure
complaining about a missing perl module.  Remembering that I had recently
upgraded perl, I did a 'use.perl system' and epiphany now builds fine and the
crashing seems to have gone away.

Searching the archives for 'use.perl' I found a suggestion that after 
switching to use.perl port, one should reinstall programs that depend on perl. 
  Not sure how to make such a list, but it seems excessive.

So, does it seem reasonable that switching perl could have caused/solved this 
problem?  How 'bleeding edge' is doing a 'use.perl port'?  Is it something 
that indeed requires a large rebuild of one's system?  If so, how does one go 
about finding the list of things which need to be rebuilt?

Thanks,
ksb