I do already have MySQL installed. I had to specify some flags while doing running the Makefile.PL, to specify the location of some MySQL header files that it was complaining about. I obtained the value of the flags by using the mysql_config.

After that I did make and make install and everything went well.

One thing again though. DBI once again got installed in some random directory inside ~/perl5/lib/perl5 and I had to manually drag it to ~/perl5/lib/perl5. I had in fact specified PREFIX also while running the Makefile.PL and it seems to have only partly heeded to it (it went inside ~/perl5/lib/perl5). Any ideas what's going on?

Thanks so much for your help.

You did use PREFIX=~ LIB=~/lib/perl5, right? It's normal to be in a "random" directory. It's actually the "arch" directory. A module (e.g. Foo::Bar) may install itself into

$LIB/Foo/Bar.*
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and/or

$LIB/$ARCH/Foo/Bar.*
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where $LIB is the value passed to LIB=, and $ARCH is some system-specific string.

In DBD::mysql's case, most if not all the files will be installed in the arch dir.

As long as PERL5LIB include $LIB, Perl will look into both directories.

$ echo $PERL5LIB
/home/ikegami/lib/perl5

$ perl -V
...
  @INC:
    /home/ikegami/lib/perl5/x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi
    /home/ikegami/lib/perl5
...
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Don't move files around, you're introducing problems!

I did specify PREFIX=~ but not LIB. Probably that's why..

Are there any places where I could read up about module installation in detail? I seem to step into a land mine at every step :)