Thanks to Sarathy, I got access to perl source repository, housed at ActiveState, and running perforce, which is a software management system thingy kinda like CVS, only much better. And it costs a lot of money, so it should be much better. I called `p4 sync` (p4 is the perforce client) to get the repository to my Linux box, and decided I wanted to try it with MPW too (perforce has clients for many different architectures and OSes). It took me awhile, because I could not easily replicate the ssh tunnel on Mac OS (MacSSH does only ssh2, but I needed ssh1), until geoffeg from #perl pointed out to us that the -g option to ssh allows me to connect to a local tunnel with a remote host. So I just restarted the tunnel with -g and pointed the MPW client to my Linux box, and there we were. I suppose if I ever need to access remotely, I could either temporarily open up a port on my home box and still use it as a ssh tunnel proxy thing, or I could use F-Secure locally to tunnel (which is suboptimal; it has been quite buggy for me). The repository sync was about 250MB, so it took awhile.
I don't know if I will use p4 more from Linux or MPW, but since I was figuring out p4 and all (reading much of its documentation late into the night), it was good to get it working on both, and get it out of the way.
So that was much of the evening. The rest I spent doublechecking the original patch. I took the amended patch from Peter Prymmer and did my own builds on Linux with it, and others with my original patch, and lo and behold and no surprises at all, his patch worked perfectly. Adding in some more changes, I got a good patch that seems to work with MacPerl and Unix perl. I will do another test build or two, and hopefully, tonight, I will look at bleadperl and see how the patches fit.
