I've been told many times by monks that if I'm serious about using perl as "part of the LAMP stack" then I should build it myself. I understand that the vendor perl should be untouched, and the custom perl built, I think in "/opt/perl". I'm building on Fedora 8, 64 bit i386 if that's of any help.

Besides making sure it goes in its own directory, are there any major decisions that have to be made differently than what Configure will give me? Someone mentioned omitting threading (on by default?) as I guess this would be marginally faster. Are there any other things I should be aware of, or do the defaults pretty much do a good job? While I'm sure building it is pretty simple (hit RETURN a lot), it's another thing to make sure you have an "optimal" build (I'm using the concept loosely here).

Are there any things I should read or consider w.r.t. Apache and mod_perl configuration? Note, I'm adept at using these things when they are provided, but I haven't seen the need to build them until now (since the .RPMs and distros are so convenient).