\rho and I "own" some perl software packages related to topicmaps, mainly the XTM package (or libxtm-perl as it's called in Debian).

\rho is busy developing its next generation implementation, and has been so for over a year now. Which is not a problem per se, but the current version of libxtm-perl are known to be incompatible with perl 5.8. As \rho was promising that the next release was to be RSN and neither of us immediately spotted the (slightly nasty) problems, libxtm-perl was removed from Debian testing as that ships with perl 5.8. I didn't have the time and impetus to dig as deep as required; would you if a working version is looming just over the horizon?

A few days ago, Niko Tyni submitted a comprehensive patch that fixes all the problems between libxtm-perl and perl 5.8. Which is especially cool as he's not even a user of libxtm-perl but just somebody interested in unicode handling in perl 5.8.

Thank you very much Niko for that act of altruism! You've given me a bit of new hope for the human race :-)