Avoid installing perl-core on Oracle Linux… it is just a matter of time!

I have to admit, after a lot of years running Perl, this was the first time I’ve seen a Linux machine without cpan. Long story short: I needed to install a Perl application of mine on a machine, so as usual I needed also some libs (modules) to get installed. The machine was not for me to administer, and perl reported version 5.16 (circa year 2012)! After a little searching for, and after confirmation on the IRC, the machine (based on Red Hat) has only the perl executable and not even the real core of Perl, packaged as perl-core. So I installed such package and started installing stuff via cpan, even if I like cpanm the most. Everything was working, until I met DateTime, that was requiring a C compiler. And the machine was lacking a C compiler too! Therefore, I had to install a compiler, and at this time, I switched to another approach: perlbrew to the rescue! Therefore, I installed perlbrew, then compiled a reasonably up to date version of Perl (i.e., 5.40.0, the latest at the time of writing) and, after having install cpanm, started to pull all the required dependencies. Another approach could have been to install all the Linux distribution packaged perl-xxx modules that I needed, but chances are that I would have to compile something in any case, and I like the idea of having a recent version of Perl at my fingertips.