in reply to using CPAN to install against older PERL

As grinder says, this is caused by old versions of CPAN. If I'm reading the docs right, perl -MCPAN -e'$CPAN::Config->{prerequisites_policy}="ignore"; install CPAN' should do the trick by upgrading the CPAN module ignoring its dependencies. The newer module should then ignore the new version of Perl.

Makeshifts last the longest.