Can I safely uninstall perl rpm ?
 

I have a redhat 5.2 system and I have perl rpm installed. it is version 5.004 I think. I need to install perl 5.005 because spam assassin requires it. when I try rpm -e perl it complains that perl is needed by bind (which I have running as this machine is also a local namerserver) and other packages. I am currently compiling perl 5.005 but unsure of how to proceed with the upgrade. I dont want to break bind and the other software that depend on perl. Can I just force uninstall this rpm (how do you do that) and then install perl from the perl source. Would the other programs that depend on perl notice the difference? Thanks

Best not to force it, and best not to mix source installs and rpm packages. Can't you find a 5.005 package for your system and CPU?

It may be hard to find an RPM (5.2 is quite old). To minimize problems (rpm will complain, but if there's no RPM, it will), look where perl executable and libraries are installed (look at the list of files using rpm) , uninstall the current RPM and install perl executables at the same place OR overwrite old perl with the one you have from source. OR, why not to have two perl versions? It may lead to trouble (you will have to switch PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH), but it may be a good idea to have both. Install the new one to /usr/local.

I couldnt resist. I uninstalled my perl rpm and downloaded perl 5.0005-3. Everything went well except the /dev/tty test which returned /dev/tty is not configured. Proceeded to install. I cannot seem to open the MCPAN shell but that did not work anyway in my current install because of an out of memory error. I had to install the modules I needed for SpamAssassin manually by tar.gz. Interestingly, I had to create dummy files opnames.h etc to get some of the modules to compile. SpamAssassin is compiling currently. Since hard drive space is limited, I was wondering if it is safe to delete the Perl source and modules source from my home directory. Do I still need these? Thanks

You can delete the sources, but first make sure they're really installed (make sure they were copied to the right location).

Thanks. I managed to successfully install spam assassin but it is too slow on my AMD 486 66 Mhz with 8 MB RAM. I installed TMDA which works pretty well. Now I am trying to install an antivirus to scan the mail. I installed clam antivirus which seems to be pretty fast. I need to install qmail-scanner. It requires the Time::Hires moduloe from perl. How do I check if I have this installed already? Thanks again