I've become totally addicted to cpanm, the easy installer for Perl modules. It's not yet in Slackware, and not on slackbuilds.org either, but (as root) ridiculously easy to install with:
curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - App::cpanminus
You just say something like cpanm LWP::Simple and and all the dependencies will be resolved. I just installed thirty modules with six commands (most were dependencies) and cpanm did all the work. Sometimes upgrading is not so bad.
I did have one problem with an old module that I had installed in a separate folder to mirror the file structure of a host provider I use. Looks scary (I hate undefined symbols!) but in this case easy to resolve. The error in apache's error_log looks something like this:
/srv/username/lib/i486-linux-thread-multi/auto/Unicode/LineBreak/LineBreak.so: undefined symbol: Perl_Gthr_key_ptr, referer: http://localhost/~username/script.cgi
The reason was simply that I had compiled Unicode::LineBreak on my old system, so I had to remove and reinstall (of course cpanm compiles it when necessary).
update Sun Apr 27 09:32:35 CEST 2014
cpanm is supposed to be without dependencies, but in Slackware 14.1 it complained about List::Util not being up to date.
List::Util version 1.33 required--this is only version 1.27 at /usr/local/bin/cpanm line 189.
This forced me to first upgrade that module in the old way by hand:
tar zxvf Scalar-List*zperl Makefile.PLcd into the new foldermakemake test (to check for errors)su; make installupdate Wednesday 21 May 2014
For the one line command with curl, obviously you need curl to be installed, which may not be the case in a basic Ubuntu server install. You may also need to install make and clang. Alternatively you can install cpanm with apt-get, but the package is called cpanminus:
apt-get install cpanminus
