Install local version of perl on Debian lenny

Posted by robbiebow on 15 August, 2009 under perl | Be the First to Comment

Although Debian comes with its own version of perl it’s a good idea to install your own local version. Here’s what I did on a fresh lenny box:

aptitude install gcc
cd /tmp/
wget http://www.cpan.org/src/perl-5.10.0.tar.gz
tar -xvf perl-5.10.0.tar.gz
cd perl-5.10.0/

I then applied a patch that fixes a known bug in 5.10.0 that affects Catalyst a fair bit:

vim +692 toke.c

#else
parser->nexttoke = 0;
#endif
+    parser->error_count = oparser ? oparser->error_count : 0;
parser->copline = NOLINE;
parser->lex_state = LEX_NORMAL;
parser->expect = XSTATE;

:wq!

Now continue with the rest of the install process:

./Configure -de
make
make test
make install

The greatest advantage of having a separate install is that aptitude won’t upgrade perl or CPAN modules for you; meaning you control what gets upgraded and when using cpan for CPAN packages and manually re-installing perl when you want to.