You should not run different versions of perl.
You (everyone) should keep your software updated and current.
Having two versions installed is not so uncommon, actually, e.g.
the Perl that came with the system, plus another up-to-date one
for your own use. In fact, I'd think leaving the system Perl alone is a
much better idea than forcing some newer, but slightly incompatible
version upon all the system tools that use Perl — just to
always have nothing but the newest and shiniest... (In particular, on
Solaris boxen, where the system Perl is often rather ancient, I'd
rather not mess with it.)
Just keep the different versions under different installation
paths, and with a bit of care and awareness of the situation,
everything should be fine. I usually have two to four perls
installed on one system (e.g. 5.8.8 (system perl), 5.10.0 (to stay up-to-date), and one or two other versions (including an old 5.6.1) for
compatibility testing etc.). Never really had much problems with it,
except when unconditionally setting PERL5LIB.
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Thank you very much for the detailed info, almut.
My comment indented below yours is for leocharre, by the way.
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You should not run different versions of perl.
Sure you should if you are advanced beyond beginner level. I would envision a common setup being a regular Perl in /usr/bin and a C debugging-enabled version in /usr/local/bin. Someone has to be able to debug scripts, to a lowlevel, and it's a waste to have a separate computer for a debugging version.
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This is exactly what I do. I generally have whatever is the latest stable perl w/debugging/threads/whatever I want in /usr/local/bin and leave /usr/bin/perl to the system packages. That way I can experiment with different CPAN packages and my own code while still having a stable system. I would really not recommend replacing /usr/bin/perl with your own versions on unix/linux - if you're unlucky, it can really mess up your system.
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My employer (a brokerage) uses three machines per Production product:
- development, where it doesn't really matter what state the software or environment is in
- QA, where the latest stable environment / software is available for testing
- Production.
Please keep in mind that some of us may be talking at cross-purposes. My software only runs under one version of Perl under Solaris, and is maintained solely for our use. If you were developing classes that needed to run under Perl 5.0, 5.8 and 5.10 on user-owned machines, I see the necessity of multiple Perl environments on one box.
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