Thanks for the update Joost. I had seen the start of that discussion before, but not to the point where a patch had been forthcoming.

Unfortunately, the patch to shared.xs does not appear to have made it onto CPAN yet. Will it ever? Or will it be held back until 5.9 is released?

That makes it very difficult for those using pre-compiled builds of perl to utilise the patch. Whilst there are several repositories that will undertake building a CPAN module to a binary and making it available via PPM, it's lees likely that the same people will undertake applying patches to core modules and building them for public accessibility with all the inherent risks that entails.

(Are you (even vaguely) interested PodMaster? :) (Pretty please:)(If I supply the tarball with the patch applied?) (Is there a mechanism for determining all the latest patches that would need to be applied to a given version of a cpan module in order to bring it upto bleedperl status?)

I've seen the forks module, but it strikes me that as forks are emulated using threads under Win32, using forks to emulated threads using emulated forks is a little....erm....artificial:)