I was having similar problems with RH9 until I discovered the magic file /etc/sysconfig/i18n. By default it sets LANG to "en_US.UTF-8", which triggers many, many unicode errors and warnings, at least with the version of perl that shipped with RH9. Get rid of the UTF-8 bit, and things may be much happier. Mine is now: 
LANG="en_US"
SUPPORTED="en_US:en_US.UTF-8:en"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"

[download]
For temporary joy, just change $LANG in your current environment to en_US if it's set to en_US.UTF-8.

I used to feel the same way about CPAN, but either it's gotten much better, or I have a bigger pile of hammers to apply to things when they break. These days, I'm well below the threshold of frustration.

In your particular case -- are you sure you've exhausted the standard set of Fedora RPMs? I don't have a Fedora handy, but in my pile of standard RH9 RPMs, I have both perl-DBD-MySQL and mod_perl RPMs.

In reply to Re: Re: Module compilation hell by sfink
in thread Module compilation hell by Anonymous Monk

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