Uninstall Perl 5.10 and Install 5.8 on Ubuntu 10.04

Question

I was using Ubuntu 8.04 with installed Perl 5.8.8. I had installed Bugzilla 3.4.4 with some custom scripts and it was working fine. I had to upgrade Ubuntu from 8.04 to 10.04 and automatically Perl is also upgraded from Perl 5.8 to 5.10. Now, accessing Bugzilla displays an error message related to Perl module. While trying to run checksetup.pl, I am getting the following error message:

root@cvsnew:/var/www/bugzilla-3.4# perl checksetup.pl
* This is Bugzilla 3.4.3 on perl 5.10.1
* Running on Linux 2.6.32-24-generic-pae #39-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jul 28 07:39:26 UTC 2010
Checking perl modules...
Checking for CGI.pm (v3.33) ok:
found v3.48
perl: symbol lookup error:
lib/i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi/auto/Digest/SHA/SHA.so: undefined symbol: Perl_Tstack_sp_ptr

Accessing Bugzilla throws : "500 Internal Server Error".

I explored this issue and found that this issue has come up because upgrading Ubuntu upgrades Perl 5.8 to 5.10 automatically. It seems like Perl 5.10.1 isn't binary compatible with the previous.

Now, I want to uninstall Perl 5.10.1 and Install Perl 5.8.8 on my Ubuntu 10.04 box. I will appreciate if someone has already done that or share the required steps/commands to do it.

Answer 1

Perhaps you can solve the problem by deviating from apt. Keep the OS distribution's perl as-is, and use perlbrew to install alternate versions of perl in another location, say in /opt/perl.

Then use shell wrappers and such to trigger perlbrew for selection of the appropriate perl at the appropriate time.

Answer 2

Yes - you need to update all perl modules when changing base version of perl.

apt-get install perl-cgi

and so on until getting it right.

Answer 3

In general the APT packaging system you use supports mixing of version from different distributions, but this might also mess up a lot.

If you can risk to destroy your system, try this (untested):

• Add a line with "hardy" instead of karmic to your /etc/apt/sources/list (the karmic line still stays there)
• aptitude install perl -t hardy should install the perl version from hardy