Putting all that together makes it really easy to break things, even with an extensive test suite.

Indeed. That's why for it to have any merit at all it would need the indulgence of someone like you.

Not to do the testing, but to guide us on how best to test. To establish some procedure that would allow us to arrive at a high degree of certainty before we request someone from p5p take a look at what has evolved. If anything.

Maybe the idea is just too half-baked, but I've seen some extraordinary results produced here ... I was just looking to see if there is a way to tap into that for the benefit of Perl5.