This is exactly what I do. I generally have whatever is the latest stable perl w/debugging/threads/whatever I want in /usr/local/bin and leave /usr/bin/perl to the system packages. That way I can experiment with different CPAN packages and my own code while still having a stable system. I would really not recommend replacing /usr/bin/perl with your own versions on unix/linux - if you're unlucky, it can really mess up your system.