Upgrade Perl on Gentoo

In case that you have just upgraded your perl version installed on a Gentoo system, don’t forget about the other packages that are compiled against the old perl version.

Let say that you have just upgraded to a new perl release using emerge:

emerge -ua perl

After you have done this don’t forget to use perl-cleaner to rebuild all your other packages that depended on the old perl version. This will go over your packages and provide you with a list of packages it will recompile. If used with the parameter ask it will allow you to decide if you want to continue or not. For example:

perl-cleaner modules ask

The perl-cleaner help page provides the full list of possible parameters:

Usage: /usr/bin/perl-cleaner [options] [ask]
modules - rebuild perl modules for old installs of perl
allmodules - rebuild perl modules for any install of perl
libperl - rebuild anything linked against libperl
revirter - replace perl-core modules with virtuals
ph-clean - clean out old ph files from a previous perl
phupdate - update existing ph files, useful after an upgrade to system parts like the kernel
phall - clean out old ph files and run phupdate
all - rebuild modules, libperl linkages, clean ph files, and rebuild them
reallyall - rebuild modules for any install of perl, libperl linkages, clean ph files, and rebuild them

ask - ask for confirmation on each emerge
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