I have pretty the same situation: debian sarge, and no will to use perl 5.8.4. I ended up in installing perl 5.8.8 into /opt/perl, and using only CPAN to install new modules in the new perl system (as a matter of fact, I keep the old perl only for scripts that may actually need it, in particular those in the debian system).

Even if there should be binary compatibility between the two versions of perl, I'd refrain from using modules from the 5.8.4. What if you need more updated modules? I've simply installed the modules again in the new tree and let them live their lives.

In a previous installation (using Slackware) I recompiled perl as well, jumping from 5.8.0 to 5.8.4. In that occasion, I played a dirt trick and made /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_lib/5.8.4 point to /usr/lib/perl5/site_lib/5.8.0 without having problems, due to binary compatibility. But I think that was a quite different situation: I have never truly used Slackware package system, so I knew I wasn't going to spoil anything installing new modules in the old perl tree.

Hope this helps,

Flavio
perl -ple'$_=reverse' <<<ti.xittelop@oivalf

Don't fool yourself.

In reply to Re: A problem with two perls on a Debian system by polettix
in thread A problem with two perls on a Debian system by rinceWind

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.