The pre-install and post-install target of lang/perl5.8 port do not check the case that user id is not 0. To enable portupgrade work running with user privilege, use SU_CMD in such cases. Fix: The patch to Makefile is attached. Note that I have a machine that place WRKDIR on a NFS partition for some reason, I'd like to run portupgrade with non-root user privilege and make use of SU_CMD. How-To-Repeat: run make install without root privilege in lang/perl5.8
Responsible Changed From-To: freebsd-ports-bugs->tobez Over to Maintainer
State Changed From-To: open->closed Ports system _is_ SU_CMD aware. Installation of lang/perl5.8 works from non-root account with defined SU_CMD (ex. in your environment).