I appear to have perl 5.8.4 working with OZ 3.5.2. I took the perl-base, perl and perm-modules 5.8.4-4_arm.deb packages from
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/p/perl/and extracted then w/ 'ar x' then re-tgz'd them up into ipks and they installed and ran fine.
Sone things to note:
(1) I know virtually nothing about building ipks. These pkgs were installed to sd and the package manager didn't run ipkg-link as usual. Had to run it manually I suspect fine-tuning is needed in control.tar.gz somewhere.
(2) Initial install put dir /usr/share/perl/5.8 This should be a symlink to /usr/share/perl/5.8.4 so that perl can find modules such as strict.pm
(3) Had to create a perl_defaults script in /etc/profile.d so that LANGUAGE="en_US" and LC_ALL="C" got set and removed warnings at launch. (same ideas as opie_defaults.
(4) I made no effort to strip out things such as man pages and docs. And I don't have time for such right now. So, resulting ipks are certainly larger than necessary.
(5) I've done only rudimentary testing. Hello world, a couple of personal text processing scripts (open file, read and tweak text, write new file) and a quick test of multiplying 2 scalars (1.234, 2.1). Tests all went fine but you are on your own from here.
I'd be willing to send these to people if you email me privately (keith@claytons.org) or post them if someone has a good public site. However, I don't have time to enhance, support or fix these packages except to meet my own needs. Don't email me looking for help . . not trying to be a jerk . . just buried right now. So basically if you have problems you are on your own.
Long term the way this "should" be done is via the OE build system. I just had immediate need so I made it work. Maybe in a couple of months, after some work projects are behind me and I have some time, I'll pull the OE build tools, chat with the deb packager and see if I can get some legit packages going.
Cheers,
K