How do I upgrade from perl 5.6 to perl 5.8 on woody using apt-get?

[Kushmit Indurain <kushmit@yahoo.com>]

Hi-

(I have been searching for quite a while on Google as
well as debian and perl mailing lists and there
appears to be very little doc on this.)

I have a box that has debian (woody) installed on it.
I've also installed perl 5.6.1 and a variety of its
associated packages (perl-modules, etc.) using apt-get
and also CPAN.

#perl -v

This is perl, v5.6.1 built for i386-linux

-------------

#apt-cache showpkg perl
Package: perl
Versions:
5.6.1-8.7(/var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.us.debian.org_debian_dists_stable_main_binary-i386_Packages)(/var/lib/apt/lists/mirrors.kernel.org_debian_dists_stable_main_binary-i386_Packages)(/var/lib/apt/lists/security.debian.org_dists_stable_updates_main_binary-i386_Packages)(/var/lib/dpkg/status)

Now, because of some dependencies in some CPAN modules
that require a higher version of perl, I would like to
upgrade my perl to 5.8. I would like to work within
the framework of apt-get, because perl has a lot of
dependencies.

But when I try to use apt-get I get an error message:

#apt-get install perl=5.8
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Version '5.8' for 'perl' was not found

Various searches have turned up no info about how to
do this kind of upgrade, yet I'm sure I can't be the
first to try this.

What am I missing?

Any info appreciated. Thanks.

-K