> I also have some production code that I could not afford to lose or have stop working.

That is an understandable reason to delay upgrading. I do recommend you test whether your application will remain to work with an upgraded system.

> I've *never* had to do the make - make-install - make-test stuff. This scares me!

I can heartily recommend reading the documentation before venturing into stuff that scares you. That usually alleviates the scariness. CPAN is not that hard to deal with and is a great tool once you get the hang of it. In fact, it caters for an 'install $package' interface.

My ActivePerl (v5.6.0, with MS Services for Unix) installation on Win32 is currently broken, so testing whether I can get CPAN going myself is currently somewhat problematic. Fixing it isn't too high a priority either, since I mostly use OpenBSD for my Perl work ;)

In reply to Re^3: modules and perl versions by rkrieger
in thread modules and perl versions by twoson

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.