I'm putting this down for posterity:

Keywords: make makefile redhat 8 9 rh9 rh8 install CPAN MakeMaker missing separator UTF-8

This is a known problem with the perl that is shipped with RedHat 8 & 9. See the following link: Redhat Bugzilla

It is related to the fact that the default locale setting on RedHat 8/9 is "en_US.UTF-8", and that version of perl has a problem in Config.pm whereby it returns junk in "*.UTF-8" locales.

The 'official' workaround at the time of this writing is to export LANG=C before running your perl Makefile.PL. I also came across a way to change the system-wide default locale, in case you want all the users on your box to be able to install CPAN modules, and you don't mind your default locale not being UTF-8:

Edit the file /etc/sysconfig/i18n

Change the line that looks like this:
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
to this:
LANG="en_US"
(it might not be en_US for you, but you get the idea)

This takes effect at login.

update: Added RedHat 8, since it appears to have the same problem as RH9

update: Please view this whole thread for the full context.

--
3dan