It's unfortunate that the documentation wasn't patched when Perl 5.10 was released, but as it turned out that nobody had tested the suidperl functionality for 5.10, and it was broken and nobody had complained, it was deemed that there was no active interest in keeping suidperl, especially as it has been a constant source of security problems. I think the usual solution to not using suidperl is the C program documented at perlsec under "Security bugs". There you'll also find the following:

The use of suidperl is considered deprecated, and will be removed in Perl 5.12.0. It is strongly recommended that all code uses the simplier and more secure C-wrappers described below.

The other approach to avoiding setuid / suidperl is to have a separate daemon program that runs as root and which accepts commands through a unix domain or TCP socket or a directory into which files with commands are dropped. So it's likely that you can rework your program that way if the C wrapper from perlsec does not work out for you.