Also, you may get better help if you say what module it is that you are trying to install.

Thank you!

I've run in to this problem myself on an older Mac that shipped with 5.6. I tried to install LWP and went down a twisty rabbit hole that led to trying to install Perl 5.8.7. For some reason it didn't occur to me to try upgrading CPAN first. (Silly of me in retrospect, but...).

Oops... maybe not.

Trying to upgrade CPAN also sends me down a dependency chain that leads to trying to upgrade Perl.

/me is not amused.

Yuck; do you know what the dependency chain that caused that was?

Did you try upgrading CPAN not using CPAN (i.e. with perl Makefile.PL; make test install)?

It's a tricky situation. Test::Simple and Test::More are very nice to work with, and once you've become familiar with them, and the other test modules that just slot right in, it's hard to go past them.

If I remember correctly (update: no, I remembered incorrectly, as pointed out below), T::S and T::M rely on low-level stuff that was added as of 5.6.0. Backporting them back to even earlier versions would require adding a certain amount of machinery to 5.005, and development efforts on 5.005 are all but dead. Leon Brocard recently released a new patchlevel (5.005_04) in the unique goal of allowing the codebase to continue compile correctly on newer, fussier compilers.

That is, even if you were to endeavour to install T::M on 5.005, I'm not even sure you could succeed.

As long as you create your own tests with the venerable Test module, you'll be fine. That is, test the functionality you want to verify in the module you're upgrading. When you're satisfied with it, send it off to the author as a patch, explaining that it will be useful for other people still running perls from the previous millenium.

Both Test::Simple and Test::Harness should work as far back as 5.5.3 (and 5.4, if I remember correctly).

I have Test::More installed on Perl 5.005_03. I don't recall any spectacular problems with the install.

I'm sure if you were to offer to maintain all the dependencies that have only a life in the core and existed after your version and place them on CPAN and ensure that they were compatible with your chosen version of Perl then everyone would be more than happy. This is after all Open Source, if you want something that nobody else has interest in supporting then it's down to you. Moaning on web forums gets you nowhere, offers of action speak very loud.

/J\

As is mentioned above, I believe this is an issue with some versions of the CPAN module that shipped with earlier perls. If you upgrade CPAN, I think you'll find that it doesn't try to force you into a full perl upgrade.

When you go to upgrade your CPAN module, you can't do it from the CPAN shell because it will send you down the same rabbit hole--during the CPAN upgrade of itself, it will try to upgrade perl.

If you run the CPAN upgrade the old fashioned way (make, make test, make install), you should then be able to use the shell as before and not have it upgrade perl. The most recent CPAN will look at the newest version of a module and if it requires a newer perl, it will just bark and say it won't install without force. This is much nicer.

thanks, I'll see if a manual CPAN upgrade does the trick.

What do you suggest be done?