Questions about building from source

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

I have always built my perl (and mod_perl) from source, so I'm trying to
get used to the Debian way.  I have a few questions I hope someone can
help with:

I want to have 5.6.1 and 5.8.0 on my machine.  I've built 5.8.0 from
source and installed into /usr/local and fixed up links to the perl binary
so "perl" still runs 5.6.1 (otherwise some package installations fail).

- Is there a better or suggested way to run two installations of Perl
under
Debian?

- If a module is not available as a Debian package, what's the recommended
way to install it?  CPAN.pm? perl Makefile.PL?  Or somehow convert it into
a .deb?

- The apache-perl package is not build with the modules I need (as I have
it built on a production Solaris machine).  So I was going to build my own
mod_perl server.  Will I break the debian perl installation when I make
install mod_perl (install all the Apache::* modules)?  Is there any worry
about binary compatibility when mixing the Debian packages with
built-from-source stuff?

I'd prefer to use the debian packages as much as possible.  Is the answer
to download the debian sources when I need to build from source?

Thanks,


-- 
Bill Moseley moseley@hank.org