[Techtalk] Need Perl RPM help

[Trent Di Renna]

Hello all.  I have a problem with some Perl RPMs...I'm trying to upgrade
to Perl 5.8 (currently I have 5.6, running Mandrake 8.1).  So I go get the
RPMs (there are two, "perl" and "perl-base", you need both), and I use
"rpm -U" to upgrade them...and rpm complains, saying that several of my
packages require perl >= 5.6...which 5.8 satisfies.  I've removed some of
the nonimportant ones, but some others are dependencies for Mandrake's
config tools, so I don't want to touch them.

The only thing I can think of, that could be the problem, is that the
version number for the existing perl is 5.600...NOT 5.6 or 5.6.0.  So
maybe it thinks that, because 8 < 600, that "5.8" is an earlier version
than "5.600".  Which would be really dumb.  :)  So maybe I could change
the filename of the new RPMs to perl-5.800<whatever>; I'm not sure that
would work though, because I'm sure the version number is also embedded in
the package itself.  The only other way I see to do it is to just force
it, with rpmdrake...the programs themselves shouldn't have a problem with
a more up to date version of perl, but I'm not sure how the packaging
system would react.

Have any of you run into similar problems?  And if you did, how did you
get around it?  Thanks in advance for any answers...

Trent Di Renna