As I mentioned in my first post this question has taken me down a path in perl that I rarely travel. (That is a good thing) I would like to thank the monks for their general patience.

On the resolution front it appears that the root cause of my initial issue is that the libxml2-dev libraries also need to be installed incremental to the libxml2 libraries in order for XML::LibXML to be installed. I am now in the process of figuring that out.