[tpm] RFI: installing multiple instances/releases for regression testing.

[J Z Tam]

Greetings Mongeren, 
BACKGROUND:
1. OS WindozeServer2003/5/8  with ActiveState.perl5.8.7(busted version)   is current release
and also  
OS linux2.6 kernel with perl5.8.3  (older version I know)

GOALS:
2. I wish to be able to upgrade the perl release up to a more current revision on both OS's, but will need to regression test all the scripts with the newer perl release IN Place.

ISSUES:
3. Windows multiple perl trees.  AFAIK,  I can install a separate perl version (ActiveState OR   Strawberry)  on the Windows side, in a non-standard directory and munge the DOS ENV and PATH  to switch back and forth between the two releases to test.  Or going out of my way to switch the underlying directory of  a link to D:\apps\perl\  directory using "JUNCTION.EXE"  or a loopback mount/share.

4.  linux multiple perl trees.  this should be as straightforward as the Windows side I'm guessing,  only the ENV setup script is slightly different, due to OS differences.

5. Enumerating existing bundle of modules.  AFAIK  you can reliably query the installed modules using:

    use ExtUtils::Installed;
    my $instmod = ExtUtils::Installed->new();
    foreach my $module ($instmod->modules()) {
        my $version = $instmod->version($module) || "???";
        print "$module -- $version\n";
    }

But this would likely NOT find  any "local::lib"  or  homegrown modules that got copied into a non- at INC path.  
e.g.    
/path/to/custom/apps/PROD/perl/SOX/bigBrotherSOXvalidater.pl  
might have a customSOX.pm  module disted with the former, in the same directory, or a lower  subdirectory like:   
/path/to/custom/apps/PROD/perl/SOX/lib/customSOX.pm

5.1  using find and grep instead to find the outlier modules?
Surely someone has learned the hard way to dig and delve for custom .pm  files or OS-specific, or vendor-specific  DLL's,  object files, libraries, bins, etc.  that would cause regression tests to fail due to a higher/lower version of the module.  Ugh.

Instantiating a handful of VM's  is not an option at this point. Ugh.
All comments are welcomed to help me fail fast.
/jordan
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