Mac Forum / Programming / Perl / January 2008

I have a client whose Production and Development Server version of Perl
is significantly out of data particularly with libraries  (even though
they are running Perl 5.8.0). This become obvious when I moved my
program on my Mac at 5.8.8 with its current libraries to their
development server. Even though it all worked, a lot of error messages
started appearing in the Apache logs. As a good programmer, I started to
fix them only to find they were experiencing these errors all the time
with all their other programs.  Investigating it more, I discovered that
their libraries were severely out of date. For example their version of
manip.pm is dated 2000.

I have propose that they install on their Development Linux server a
later version of Perl in another location and migrate the application
over (e.g. /usr/new/perl). Their concern is there is only one MySQL
program, but the Perl libraries to access it would be  different.
Second, they think installing a later version of Perl in a different
location would overwrite the current library. I am not really clear how
Perl locates its install Libraries, so I would like some clarification
on this issue with two different versions running. Is there a setup
method with Perl to make sure this does not happen? They will probably
use CPAN to add the new libraries. How should this be set up? Another
issue is they are using a MySQL 4.x version. Not a MySQL 5.x version. On
my Mac, I had to load DBI and DBD driver for MySQL 5 and update MySQL to
5.x. But I suppose I can get older versions from CPAN.