The development environment looks as though its an SVN (Subversion) checkout, hence the inclusion of the trunk in the path. If so, the originator does get top marks for version controlling his code. Having said that, he should probably have just checked out a copy of the trunk to a local sandbox and avoided having "trunk" in the path.

svn co http://your_repository/trunk local_directory is a good way to avoid this. This would have solved the discrepancy between his "development" and "production" relative paths and avoided the problem described. I still stick to my earlier statement that setting PERL5LIB or similar environment variable is the best way to resolve the problem. I presume the production version runs as a different user from the development version, so this could be accomplished by setting the environment variable in ~/.bashrc or the Apache config files.

I'll leave exactly how to do that as a Google exercise as its getting past my bedtime :-)