So this is exactly what CPAN did on the other server, it made a seperate installation of perl from the servers. It's installations were in /usr/local/bin rather than /usr/bin and I suppose SpamAssassin picked up on this.
What do you recommend then? using CPAN or downloading Perl's tar-ball and installing that? (I think in effect they do one in the same thing? Any one sure?)
Comment on Re^2: Upgrading Perl on Linux From 5.6.1 to 5.8.x
And I personally tend to keep my own "application" version of Perl compiled separately from source ...
This means grabbing the source to Perl and compiling it by hand. That allows me to run Perl's configure and tweak where it installs things and what not by hand; if CPAN.pm does this you're going to get the defaults.