broke my code on there only insofaras I had to recompile the CPAN modules I was using due to the binary incompatibilities

That made me wonder why INSTALL_BASE is recommended over PREFIX. Using the latter, XS modules would go missing rather than become invalid, and you could actually have multiple perl installs using the same lib dir (which is good since they all use the same ENV var to locate the lib dir).

I just use perlbrew now.