Okay, so I have come to a solution (of sorts). I have unset the PERL5LIB in my ~/.bashrc and it appears to work. Now when I do the above I get the results you would expect.

Furthermore, I decided to check what @INC and $PERL5LIB are now as follows:

% perl -MData::Dumper -e 'print Dumper { INC_ARRAY => [ @INC ], PERL5L
+IB => $ENV{PERL5LIB} }'
$VAR1 = {
          'INC_ARRAY' => [
                           '/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0/i686-linux',
                           '/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0',
                           '/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/i686
+-linux',
                           '/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0',
                           '.'
                         ],
          'PERL5LIB' => undef
        };
[download]

Now though it seems that the modules I installed in 5.8.8 (e.g Smart::Comments) are no longer working but that is not really a problem. I just have to update CPAN and I can reinstall the modules I still need.

Thank you all for your input =)