I've been going through the old "Perl building on AIX" bugs on rt. The standard answers have been approximately: The version of AIX you're using is not supported (AIX 5.3 goes out of support at the end of this month, 5.1 is already out of support). The version of Perl you're using is out of support. I've compiled Perl 5.14.2 on AIX 6 with xlC successfully. I've also compiled 5.14.0 on the same machine, but ended up with a few problems compiling other modules that I've not had with 5.14.2, not entirely sure why that is.

Given that perl 5.12 is about to be out of support with the imminent release of perl 5.16 (some time next month), I would suggest not bothering with 5.12, either.

Please tell your management that AIX 6.1 will be the oldest level of AIX still supported by IBM as of May 1. They should upgrade as soon as possible to ensure continued support. As for your perl question, I have every plan of using perl 5.16.1 in my next deliverable. Yes, 5.16.0 isn't out yet, but I need to plan ahead :-) I've watched p5p a bit lately due to other reasons (which is how I got dragged into this), and I have to say, as a general rule, always go with the latest available version at the time of the upgrade. (Exceptions have been made for releases like 5.8.0, 5.8.7, 5.10.0.) You'll get more bugfixes, and better support.

I say all this without having tried S::WE/S::PE.

I've also written a Configure wrapper that has helped me do the above testing - that way I don't have to sit through Configure's lengthy questions and can get the same results each time, modulo the extra options passed in. If you're going to test a bunch of versions, I recommend doing the same. I even cheat: my perlconfigure tool runs off the system perl. I use perl to configure perl :-). (Then again, I also have a wrapper written to select one of a number of perls, also written in perl, and then eval 'dev_perl -S $0 "$@"' [\n] if 0; selects the right perl automatically... so I kinda cheat all the time.)

Edit: And, yes, absolutely, do not touch the system perl. Install your new version elsewhere and use that.