I have a webserver where I'm running a few projects that make fairly extensive use of Perl's Unicode features. The server is running on Debian stable, so unfortunately this means I have to work with Perl 5.6.1.

I am slowly getting very fed up with 5.6.1's Unicode support and definitely want to switch to a 5.8 version. However, as far as I know (confirmed by the SVK Wiki), there is no 5.8 for Debian stable, so I only seem to have three alternatives:

  1. Move the whole server to Debian unstable, losing security updates
  2. Install Perl from source, but going well beyond Install parallel Perl on Debian because on top of that, I have to install Apache and mod_perl from source as well!
  3. Wait till Debian Sarge is released... in a year. Or two. Or three.

All three alternatives sound rather scary (although the second one less so, since I'm a bit security-minded). Any hints how I should go about this problem?

In reply to Perl 5.8 on Debian by crenz

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