Mod_perl is generally the way that perl scripts are run when serving web pages with Apache. Unfortunately, for this workhorse of the web, a great disaster struck a few months ago.

The mod_perl team decided to go ahead with a Great Renaming. The Great Renaming involved changing the names of modules that started 'Apache' to 'Apache2'. That meant that everyone had to rejig their software to keep it working.

However, just before the Great Renaming took place, the Debian project froze its version of mod_perl in the current stable version of Debian, called 'Sarge'. So, Debian stable is stuck with version 1.999.21 of mod_perl2, whilst the Great Renaming took place in version 1.999.22.

This means that people running Debian stable can't really use Apache2 with mod_perl. And even if they tried to rewrite their software to deal with this quirk, Debian stable doesn't have the Apache request library which is usually necessary for anything interesting to run.

What a cock-up!

There are a couple of solutions. One is to roll your own. A description of how to do it is here.

There is another solution, even though it doesn't have the Debian team's stamp of stability. That is to use the recent backport from Backports.org. It's available here. It appears to work.

Once I did this, I found that the CGI.pm installed with Debian stable won't work with this newer mod_perl. Rather than muck around with even more backports and trying to roll my own Debian package, I grabbed a more recent CGI.pm from cpan.

perl -MCPAN -e 'install CGI' 

It all appears to work. Now, it's just a matter of getting used to the differences between Apache 1.3 and Apache2.

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