Nit fever struck me:

> Note that at some point early this year I did grab the NetBSD pkgsrc

...late last year.

> patches for Perl, and backported most of them.  What I didn't backport
> were the NetBSD-installation specific patches.  See the changes file

... the Changes file.

> Another safety hatch is that even if you say "make install" the
> binaries will be installed with "5.7.3" prefix.  This will cause

... "5.7.3" suffix.

-- 
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
        # There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
        # It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen