I spent two or three hours yesterday banging my head against various walls trying to install a program, Poptool, that screens incoming email for spam and learns to identify it. I just wanted to try it out; it sounded very good.

As with many such attempts in the past, I came up against the fact that this program wanted a newer version of Perl than I have on my system. But uninstalling the current version in order to go to the newer version was going to rob me of many, many applications that depended on the older version, and effectively cripple my normal ability to use the computer.

So I finally gave up.

Is there ANY way to get around this problem? I've been told it's hazardous in the extreme to allow two versions of Perl to exist on the same computer.

As long as programs are this difficult to install, mainstream users are going to be frustrated in their attempts to convert to using Linux, and will return to the dominant operating system, which is a great pity.

Well, if you have a version of Perl as an RPM package, you could try to upgrade to the newer version of Perl, if this is an RPM package too---the -U switch is for RPM upgrades. But I do not know whether this checks if programs depend on the old version, then this wouldn't work...
If the new Perl version is not an RPM package, you can try to use RPM on the command line with the '--nodeps' switch (which ignores package dependencies) to erase the old version. But then, the RPM database lacks; if this is a problem for you, you should better let it be.

Try to find an RPM package (http://www.rpmseek.com/), and if there is none for the version you need, there is still the other way.

Hope I could help,
mschutte

Thanks, mschutte. I will try the upgrade idea; I hadn't thought of that. What I did was initiate the process of getting rid of the old version with urpme, which then informed me of a list of about twenty applications it also proposed to get rid of, that depended on Perl. It didn't occur to me to see if I could upgrade successfully.

The problem I foresee, though, is that if upgrading DOES work, then the old apps may not work under the new version, and I'll effectively lose them that way!

I know some applications use a "magic number" technique which prevents them from working under a version of Perl that they were not written for.

The more I think about it, as I write this, the more I think I'd probably better just give up on the whole thing. I wish those apps (and Poptool) were written in C++.