I am not sure if it makes a lot of difference, but my perl version is: [opt]$ perl -v
This is perl, v5.6.1 built for i386-linux But: DBI-1.41 Makefile uses $] to guess the perl version, and that gives a lower version: [opt]$ perl -e 'print "$]\n"' 5.006001 Will this have consequences for building DBI-1.41 ?