[vox-tech] Upgrading Perl in Debian

[Mike Simons]

On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 08:07:43PM -0800, Richard S. Crawford wrote:
> My Debian installation has Perl version 5.6; I'd like to upgrade to
> 5.8.  Is there a super-easy way to do that (apt-get doesn't seem to be
> doing it)?  Or a less than thoroughly painful way, at least?

It depends on what your /etc/apt/sources.list says... you are probably
using "stable" or "woody".

At this point Debian testing is being frozen for the next stable
release... most major changes are over with (X11 4.3 is still expected to 
land in testing before the final changes).  So at this point I think
it's getting safe for most people to switch to testing.

If you want to do this, edit the sources.list change all "stable" or
"woody" words to "testing"... comment out security... you should get a
file that looks something like the following:
===
# deb file:///usr/src/apt/ ./
# deb http://security.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb http://non-us.debian.org/non-US/ testing/non-US main contrib
non-free

# deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib
# non-free
# deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/non-US/ testing/non-US main contrib
# non-free
===

then run "apt-get update", "apt-get dist-upgrade".


This process is medium-risk, you will get the new perl, but new
everything else too.

There are ways to just get the new perl and things it depends on from
testing, or compile the perl in testing against the stable system...
they are just more complex to explain and lower risk.  If you don't 
feel upto using testing... as for one of these. 

Keep in mind if you mess up perl, there are quite alot of other things 
that will break.