In GNU Emacs 21.2.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit)
 of 2003-01-17 on unix.home
configured using `configure  --without-pop --without-tiff'
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: C
  value of $LC_MONETARY: C
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: C
  value of $LC_TIME: C
  value of $LANG: ru_RU.KOI8-R
  locale-coding-system: cyrillic-koi8
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug
and the precise symptoms of the bug:

cperl-mode from Emacs 21.2 is broken: I can't set faces on a tty by
(set-face-* ...), while customize works -- because of a silly (if ...),
that, possibly, was actual, whan there was no color on tty and where
there was no gnuclient.

Happily removed it and sending the patch.