Installing Perl 5.6.1 from source on Debian

[Michael G Schwern]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 06:53:48PM +0000, Russell Matbouli wrote:
> The main problem seems to be that there are some Debian:: modules that
> aren't installed under 5.6.1 obviously.
> 
> So the question is - what is the best way to make Debian use 5.6.1?

Prayer.

Ruling out divine intervention, you could just upgrade to the testing
distribution.  Its already using 5.6.1 and its quite stable.  I've
been using it for years. [1] Just be prepared for it to Do Things to
your computer, like install X 4.0 (which isn't Bad, just might require
some reconfiguration).

Or you can just install 5.6.1 in /usr/local/ and put it somewhere in
your path.  That way all the Debian #!/usr/bin/perl or
#!/usr/local/bin/perl programs will still work.

There's also the Debian Perl Policy document (part of the
debian-policy package) which doesn't really cover this problem but is
worth a read if you're going to start tinkering with this stuff.

You could copy all the Debian::* files to your local installation.

Or you could find all the packages which contain Debian::* modules and
force them to go into your local installation.

$ dpkg -S /usr/share/perl5/Debian/*
adduser: /usr/share/perl5/Debian/AdduserCommon.pm
debconf: /usr/share/perl5/Debian/DebConf
debhelper: /usr/share/perl5/Debian/Debhelper
defoma: /usr/share/perl5/Debian/Defoma
dfontmgr: /usr/share/perl5/Debian/DefomaWizard
dfontmgr: /usr/share/perl5/Debian/Dfontmgr
$ dpkg -S /usr/lib/perl5/Debian/*
debian-test: /usr/lib/perl5/Debian/DebianTest.pm
dpkg-ftp: /usr/lib/perl5/Debian/DpkgFtp.pm

Or talk to the Debian Perl package maintainers.  They have to have
been asked this before.


[1]  Of course, I also just fixed my laptop with masking tape.


-- 

Michael G. Schwern   <schwern at pobox.com>    http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/
Perl Quality Assurance	    <perl-qa at perl.org>	       Kwalitee Is Job One
please remove your pants
we promise this won't hurt much
prepare for insertion
	-- Fmh