Perl for no good reason

I wanted to install webmin on a whim. It's all perl, so I thought I'd fire up cpan and update my perl. That was a massive undertaking, as most of my perl install was what came with the OS. Naturally, there were numerous problems. Most of them were traced to a myserious "only available with the XS version" error message, for which this post was the cure. It too several tries to get CPAN itself updated along with a gazilion modules, but it's all good.