Concurrent multiple versions of Perl

meonkeys has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I want to install Perl 5.6, but leave my 5.003_05 as the default perl binary. Is this as simple as soft-linking "perl" to "perl5.00503"? Will my Perl libraries get screwed up? More importantly: what manpages should I read to help understand the answers to these questions?

Thank you.

Comment on Concurrent multiple versions of Perl

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(tye)Re: Concurrent multiple versions of Perl by tye (Sage) on Feb 15, 2001 at 22:40 UTC
Yes. You can share some space by having both versions of Perl use the same lib trees (but different lib/arch trees)... but I'd avoid that. It is way too easy for me to see some perl-only scripts that don't play well together between the two versions of Perl. So when you configure Perl 5.6, be sure to specify a location for lib different from what Perl 5.003 is using. (For Windows, just install Perl 5.6 in a different directory.) - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")	[reply]
Re (tilly) 1: Concurrent multiple versions of Perl by tilly (Archbishop) on Feb 15, 2001 at 22:45 UTC
My solution was in Configure to say that the installed binaries should go into a tree below my home directory. Then I compiled and installed as me, thereby being utterly guaranteed of things like not messing up man pages. Perl didn't intend to install over them, and the OS wouldn't have let me even if Perl lied about what it was planning to do. (Perl didn't lie.:-) Running multiple versions actually turned out to be ridiculously easy.	[reply]