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

[Brendan O'Dea <bod@debian.org>]

On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 12:03:59AM -0800, Kushmit Indurain wrote:
>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.

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

You need to add some entries to /etc/apt/sources.list which include a
newer version of perl (testing and/or unstable), and you probably need
to set some policies if you wish to keep your system "mostly woody".

There are several documents which describe APT's policies (pinning), one
of which is here:

    http://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html

You might try adding at least the testing distribution to
/etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/preferences as described, then try:

    apt-get install perl/testing

Note that such configurations aren't supported.  If you need perl 5.8.X
for a specific application, an alternative would be to build your own
perl from source under /usr/local for that application.

--bod