On Jan 12, 2008, at 22:55, brian hunter wrote:

Help! Anyone know how to get around this? This is after I manually downloaded the archive and stuck it in /opt/local/var/macports/ distfiles/perl5.8/ because I was getting the 'fetch failed' error. Sorry, I'm a bit of a newb.

Then probably the archive you fetched is not the one the maintainer of the port was expecting to find. Your archive probably differs in subtle (or possible non-subtle) ways from the correct archive. Where did you get it from? I too get a fetch error for perl5.8. It seems many files are missing from the CPAN server. I'll file a ticket and see what I can do about it: http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/ticket/13903