I closed out all of my outstanding high priority bugs for MacPerl, and have integrated the fixes into both branches. I have a few more assigned to Matthias (God bless him!), but now, as soon as I get time, I want to do a release of MacPerl 5.7.3.
I'll try to do some work on Encode too, if I can, at least enough to identify what problems may exist. And then when those other bugs are taken care of, I'll release 5.6.1r2.
Thomas Wegner has some GUI work I am going to include in 5.7/5.8 too, but that will be added a bit later (I just want to get it out right now). Also, I want to start using 5.7/5.8 regularly soon, but that will require new builds of certain XS modules. That's OK, Thomas will want to use the 5.7/5.8 betas too, sooner or later, so I imagine some of his builds he'll re-build for 5.8. >:-)