A few days ago I decided to "bite the bullet" and upgrade from my workhorse Perl 5.8 to 5.10. I discovered that ActiveState had v5.12 and I thought...Wow!...bonus!

I have upgraded through three major release upgrades of Perl over the past several years and it has been painless and straightforward. I had resisted this upgrade due to an erronious understanding of my IDE which I thought had hard-wired itself to specific versions of Perl. But doing some research and thinking about it logically (I'm not known for that kind of "good practie") I realized that the IDE doesn't care what version of Perl, it only cares about where to look and what the executable's name is.

So, excited by a lot of what I'd heard and read about the newer versions of Perl I did the upgrade. It was as painless as deleting the old version and installing the new one and my IDE just keeps on cranking along.

I thought "Wow! This is terrific! Wish I had done this earlier."

Then all the world began to crumble. I discovered, after reading the upgrade Readme file that I would have to reload all my CPAN modules...all 547 of them! So I spent almost 3 days grinding my way through THAT process. At the conclusion I thought "OK, I only had a few CPAN modules in the past so I guess that's a bit of the price I have to pay for becoming a more prolific CPAN user (but I've come to love my CPAN modules!)." Seems like there should be a more automated way to do it. But I didn't have the energy or will to build my own automated approach in Perl so I just chalked it up to fate and was grateful I had gotten it done...even it was manually.

Then more and more of my scripts began failing. I thought "What's going on?" I did a bit more researching and discovered that many of the CPAN modules can't work with 5.10 or later! Apparently, in particular, it is true for many of MY scripts!

I keep getting error messages of (I paraphrase) "Can't find Perl59.dll..." which is an indication that a module (as far as my research tells me) needs the old Perl 5.8. At first I thought it was because I had some how missed re-intalling the particluar modules. The error messages didn't tell me which modules, so I just presumed that it is at least one of the modules in that script's use invocations. So I just re-did the re-installs for all of that cript's modules.

That did, indeed, at first seem to remedy the problem.

But then more and more of my scripts kept failing even afeter I did the module re-install. And I have yet to get them to work.

So, long story short, I am completely disenchanted with the upgrade and am about to get rid of it and go back to 5.8.

I do almost all of my module installations using ActiveState's Perl Package Manager (PPM) on my Widnows XP system because it is genearlly the simplest and easiest approach. I occasionally have used the CPAN installer and have even less frequently done the installs mannually using nmake.

I'm not looking for any advice; but I am really frustrated as I was looking forward to exploring some of the really neat features of the newest versions. I'm disappointed that apparently that is just not going to be possible.

ack Albuquerque, NM

In reply to Wow! Painful upgrade to Perl 5.12 by ack

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