any Perl history experts out there?

[Jeff Trawick]

a.k.a. "What should the apxs 2.0 require statement say?"

apxs says "require 5.003;"

on an old Sun box with this installation:

$ which perl
/opt/LWperl/bin/perl
$ perl -version
This is perl, version 5.003 with EMBED
        built under solaris at Mar 12 1997 03:06:34
        + suidperl security patch
Copyright 1987-1996, Larry Wall

Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License 
or the
GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5.0 source kit.

apxs fails to build a module, giving this error message from Perl:

Can't modify stub in list assignment at /tmp/trawick/built/bin/apxs line 
600, ne
ar ");"

Line 600 has

597     # the '()=' trick forces list context and the scalar
598     # assignment counts the number of list members (aka number
599     # of matches) then
600     my $cntopen = () = ($before =~ m|^\s*<[^/].*$|mg);
601     my $cntclose = () = ($before =~ m|^\s*</.*$|mg);
This silly perl won't even allow var declaration on foreach :)

foreach my $var (@list)