Putting this down here both for the public and for myself as a reminder.

I still run ActivePerl v12, both because our production servers are at that version and because i see a lot of windows users at that version and lower. I use CPAN a lot and do tend to find obscure issues that break modules on v12 or cause incompatibilities.

However there's a fairly big stone in the way when going that path, since ActiveState has followed their rolling lockdown policy and with the release of Pumpkin Perl v18 locked the PPM servers for v12 (and below) to the public, leaving them only access…