Re: Perl 5.6

[Faheem Mitha <faheem@email.unc.edu>]

On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Jason Price wrote:

> 
> I am currently running a stable distribution of debian, but want to get 
> Perl 5.6 installed.  I noticed it is not in the stable distribution.  
> What would be the safest/best/easiest way to get it installed?  I'm a 
> pretty new linux user, so be gentle.  :)
> 
> Thanks.

I did just this the other day. There is a polish site with backported debs
for potato. See the following url (from a recent posting on debianplanet).

http://www.grey.debian.pl/potato.html

You need to add 

deb http://potato.grey.debian.pl/ stable .

and/or 

deb-src http://potato.grey.debian.pl/ stable .

And then, perhaps, refresh and do 

apt-get install perl ?

I have perl installed, and dpkg -l gives me 

ii  perl           5.6.0-21potato Larry Wall's Practical Extracting and
Report

There also seem to be packages called perl-5.6. You could ask the packager
which one would be appropriate for your situation.

The system will replace the earlier perl packages by dummy packages so
that all the packages that have dependencies on earlier versions of perl
don't get broken.

Disclaimer: It worked for me, but I can't promise it will work for you.
Please don't blame me if it breaks your system.

                          Sincerely, Faheem Mitha.