I currently have perl version 5.8.4 installed on my debian system Sarge 3.1. I want to maintain the 5.8.4 version and install another version of perl preferably version 5.8.8. I think this is possible by just picking an install path and setting up an environment variable to point to the alternative location or a aliases.

But I am not sure so some guidance would be extremely helpful at this point.

Thanks

Tameika

I've only recently started exploring the Debian way of doing things so I can't tell you how to make a parallel installation of Perl using "the Debian way".

I'd guess that if you tried dpkg, apt, or aptitude, you'd just upgrade the current installation instead of getting the parallel installation.

The only way I can think of the get the parallel installation, is to install from source tarball. In the ./configure phase of installation, be careful to specify installation options that won't overwrite the current installation: such as --prefix= , --libdir=, --bindir-, etc. The default installation locations in the tarball (and the .deb) would just overwrite the current installation. By specifying options to alternate locations, you get the parallel installation.

Since I don't know your level of experience with tarball installations, I'll assume little experience, just to be safe.
Select a location to unpack the tarball, such as /usr/local.
Unpack the tarball: tar -xvf <tarball name>. That will leave a folder with the package name in /usr/local.
Cd to that folder, then run '/configure --help' for a list of configuration options. Look for the options that allow you to specify installation locations of parts of the package. You would probably set them all to /usr/local/<some folder name> to keep them from overwriting current installation.

Construct the command line, with the appropriate options to ./configure. Then run make and make install. You should have a parallel installation.

It would be a good idea to backup your system before you start. If you break things, restore the backup to get back to square one, then try again.

Thank you for those instructions, however when I try to do a make test after the LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set to the build directory it errors out on me. Any ideas on how to correct this?


Failed 1 test script out of 930, 99.89% okay.
### Since not all tests were successful, you may want to run some of
### them individually and examine any diagnostic messages they produce.
### See the INSTALL document's section on "make test".
### You have a good chance to get more information by running
### ./perl harness
### in the 't' directory since most (>=80%) of the tests succeeded.
### You may have to set your dynamic library search path,
### LD_LIBRARY_PATH, to point to the build directory:
### setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH `pwd`:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH; cd t; ./perl harness
### LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH; cd t; ./perl harness
### export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH; cd t; ./perl harness
### for csh-style shells, like tcsh; or for traditional/modern
### Bourne-style shells, like bash, ksh, and zsh, respectively.
u=1.43 s=0.45 cu=182.08 cs=16.77 scripts=930 tests=116705
make[2]: *** [_test_tty] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/perl-5.8.8'
make[1]: *** [_test] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/perl-5.8.8'
make: *** [test] Error 2