Installing ancient perls with Perlbrew

Question

I'm trying to use perlbrew to install some older Perls. I believe it's failing due to the old-style version numbers. According to perlbrew available:

  perl-5.14.3-RC1
  perl-5.16.1
  perl-5.14.2
  perl-5.12.4
  perl-5.10.1
  perl-5.8.9
  perl-5.6.2
  perl5.005_04
  perl5.004_05
  perl5.003_07

However, when I run perlbrew install perl5.003_07, I get:

 Unknown installation target "perl5.003_07", abort. Please see
 `perlbrew help` for the instruction on using the install command.

If I try it by giving a direct link to the tarball, e.g. perlbrew install http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl5.005_03.tar.gz, it downloads the tarball but the regex for parsing the version number fails:

Use of uninitialized value $dist_version in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/local/share/perl5/App/perlbrew.pm line 686.
Fetching perl- as /home/cpanci/perl5/perlbrew/dists/perl5.005_03.tar.gz
Use of uninitialized value $dist_version in pattern match (m//) at /usr/local/share/perl5/App/perlbrew.pm line 925.
Installing /home/cpanci/perl5/perlbrew/build/perl5.005_03 into ~/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-

This could take a while. You can run the following command on another shell to track the status:

  tail -f ~/perl5/perlbrew/build.perl-.log

Use of uninitialized value $dist_version in pattern match (m//) at /usr/local/share/perl5/App/perlbrew.pm line 952.
Use of uninitialized value $dist_version in pattern match (m//) at /usr/local/share/perl5/App/perlbrew.pm line 969.

Installing /home/cpanci/perl5/perlbrew/build/perl5.005_03 failed. Read /home/cpanci/perl5/perlbrew/build.perl-.log to spot any
issues. 

Any ideas? It's working fine for newer perls.

This is with App::perlbrew version 0.52.

Answer 1

I think you're stuck having to hack on perlbrew. I can get some ways by renaming the tarball perl-5.5.3.tar.gz and making a symlink in perl5/perlbrew/build like so:

lrwxrwxrwx  1 darch users   12 Oct  8 14:16 perl-5.5.3 -> perl5.005_03

, but at that point it tries to run 5.5.3's Configure with options it doesn't understand. It doesn't look to me like trying to build such old Perls with perlbrew is actually supported, for all that it does cheerfully list them.