is now out and is described at: <http://nntp.x.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/79048>
Barring miraculous patch appearances, the following VMS-specific problems will stay with us for 5.8.1 final: Net::Ping won't work because of its dependence on fcntl(). It also depends on the presence of an echo server (port 7), which is not installed by default with HP TCP/IP Services, though it is with Multinet. stdin inheritance in piped subprocesses is not quite unix-like because of the way vmspipe.com gets involved in handling process-permanent files. globbing does not work on relative filespecs that ascend above the current directory (../foo*). Some pack() operations will fail on OpenVMS Alpha before version 7.2 when using IEEE math (t/op/pack.t #39). All told that's not so horrible considering there are 75,000 tests that pass.
