Perl 5.10 on CentOS 5?

Question

I would like to run some perl-scripts on my server that require perl 5.10. Perl 5.10 seems to be released many years ago and is still not available for CentOS5.

In #rhel I was recommended to install RHEL6, but I use CentOS. In #centos I was jokingly recommended to install CentOS-6.

This leaves me wondering... all other Linux distributions I know already support perl 5.10, except for CentOS. Should I manually install perl 5.10? Or is this likely to end up making my server a mess? Or should I try to rebuild packages based on Fedora source packages?

Answer 1

The RPMs at https://packages.endpoint.com/rhel/5/os/ look good. They install perl in /usr/local.

Answer 2

Something like this should work:

wget http://www.cpan.org/src/perl-5.12.3.tar.gz
tar -xzf perl-5.12.3.tar.gz
cd perl-5.12.3
./Configure -des -Dprefix=$HOME/localperl
make
make test
make install

Then you can run the scripts with /usr/bin/perl5.12.3

Answer 3

The "Modern" way of setting up a version of Perl different from the system Perl is by using
perlbrew - this way you can maintain a Perl version on a per-user basis without messing too much with the system installed perl; this way system installed stuff that uses Perl still works without problems.