Re: Installing Perl 5.6.1
On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 09:11:17AM -0400, Steve Dondley wrote:
> Situation:
> Debian ships with Perl 5.005. But there are more recent versions of Perl
> and Debian lists two versions of Perl 5.6.1, "testing" and "unstable".
>
> Questions:
> 5.6.1 has been out quite a while and Perl.com lists 5.6.1 as "stable". What
> about it is not considered "stable" for use on Debian? Or is the "unstable"
> label just some kind of formality?
"stable", "testing", and "unstable" are versions of the distribution as
a whole, not of individual packages. We don't update the stable version
with that sort of drastic change very often; Perl is wired into Debian
at quite a low level, and when it was upgraded in unstable near the end
of last year it *did* break things quite badly for a while, partly due
to incompatibilities and partly due to Debian package reorganizations.
Quite a lot would have to be changed in stable to make it work - debconf
and such - and it wouldn't really be stable any more.
Bear in mind that, when the last stable release of Debian was made, Perl
5.6.0 wasn't yet out.
If you need perl 5.6.1, compile it yourself and install it in
/usr/local.
> Is there a way to install 5.6.1 without wiping out 5.005? In other words,
> can I have both versions running on my machine, allowing the scripts to
> determine which version of Perl to use?
I usually recommend letting Debian packages continue to use the version
of perl shipped with that version of the distribution, as that's how
they're tested and known to work. Putting a newer version of perl in
/usr/local lets you use it for your own scripts, though.
> Please keep in mind I'm a total Linux newbie and barely know how to
> use apt-get.
There should be reasonably good documentation on building perl in the
source distribution.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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