locked_user sundialsvc4 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I find myself thoroughly confused by trying to bring CPAN up-to-date on a CentOS system, which happens to (still) be running Perl 5.8.8.

To make a very long, very strange story very short, I’m simply trying to bring the very-early CPAN (1.7602) that lives on this system, up-to-date for a non-root user, and I seem to be running into catch-22’s all over the place.

As a very simple example, I get messages like this one:
'INSTALL_BASE' is not a known MakeMaker parameter name.

I’m also seeing problems with “recursive dependencies” (involving File::Path and File::Spec) if I simply try to install Bundle::CPAN.

At this point, fully realizing that “something is vewy skwewy here,” I am officially pressing the Pause button and humbly petitioning the Monks for help.   I know, from Google, that I am not the first poor soul to be whacking my head on this.   Could someone else who has whacked into this problem, kindly show me The Way?

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Re: Urk?! A *slew* of problems installing on CentOS
by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on May 24, 2011 at 04:18 UTC

    Thus far, I have (just...) attempted the following:

    1. Reasoning that ExtUtils::MakeMaker was probably “the” key module that needed to be brought up-to-date, I removed files from the previous attempts and tried install ExtUtils::MakeMaker.   The command seemed to succeed, but it generates a peculiar message, all skipped: ExtUtils::CBuilder not installed or couldn't find a compiler.
    2. Attempting to install ExtUtils::CBuilder complains that ExtUtils::MakeMaker version 6.31 required--this is only version 6.30   And so it is.   The installed-version of this module (which I had attempted to update in step #1) is still 6.30 whereas the current CPAN version is 6.56.
    Looking at the logs, I see that CPAN indeed did retrieve what it thought was the correct version:
    ftp://cpan.netnitco.net/pub/mirrors/CPAN/authors/id/M/MS/MSCHWERN/ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.56.tar.gz

    Well... when I use the command i ExtUtils::MakeMaker within CPAN, I can plainly see my problem:

    DESCRIPTION Writes Makefiles for extensions
    CPAN_USERID MSCHWERN (Michael G Schwern <mschwern@cpan.org>)
    CPAN_VERSION 6.56
    CPAN_FILE M/MS/MSCHWERN/ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.56.tar.gz
    DSLI_STATUS SupO (standard,comp.lang.perl.*,perl,object-oriented)
    MANPAGE ExtUtils::MakeMaker - Create a module Makefile
    INST_FILE /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/ExtUtils/MakeMaker.pm
    INST_VERSION 6.30
    That is not the place where I thought ...

    (Blink.)   “Oh, damn...”

    Effin’ PERL5LIB ... yup, that was it.   Well, I guess I’m not gonna delete this, but ... boy, do I feel stoopid.

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