Hello wise-ones!
This is a multipart question, recently I upgraded one of my Linux servers from Perl 5.6.1 to Perl 5.8.8. The upgrade was sort of a side effect of trying to use CPAN to install SpamAssassin. The server is in pretty bad condition if you ask me but everything seem to be working fine.

Now I have to upgrade a second Linux server and I read somewhere that you should not use CPAN to upgrade CPAN, my requirement are as follows:

1) Upgrade Perl
2) Install SpamAssassin
3) Install OpenSSL

My questions are:
a) Will upgrading perl also provide me with a newer version of CPAN?
b) What is the best way to upgrade to a newer version of Perl? Download a tar-ball and install it or use CPAN?

My server is a Red-Hat Linux 7.2.

Help will be really appricaited as the upgrade is scheduled for this weekend and I dont think it is a good idea to repeat what I did last time.

Thanks in advance


In reply to Upgrading Perl on Linux From 5.6.1 to 5.8.x by ali.muzaffar

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.