Error and status messages are specific, it helps if you give accurate details. AFAIK CPAN does not try to upgrade the core Perl interpretter. It will try *upgrade and initialize itself* however and I suspect that this is what you actually mean. Type perl -v to see what version of Perl you have.

As for changes there won't be any significant ones. Nothing really happens until make install and this won't happen without a successful make test, which won't happen until a successful make has occurred. The shrapnel (ie associated files) will be in ~/.cpan if you wish to delete them.

See A guide to installing modules for how to manually install HTML::Template. Click the link to go to CPAN. Find the download link..... You will do something like:

wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/S/SA/SAMTREGAR/HTML-Templa
+te-2.7.tar.gz
tar xzf HTML-Template-2.7.tar.gz
cd HTML-Template-2.7
perl Makefile.PL
make && make test && make install
[download]