Sometimes there are advantages to letting someone else do the machine monkeywork. I finally got mod_perl working on this system, some months after I thought I had done it and after three days of hairpulling and muttered profanity.
At some point I may write down my experience and send it on to whoever wrote the documentation I have been reading. In hindsight, it makes sense, but there were some assumptions made that didn’t help me very much. There’s not a lot of attention paid to migrating existing CGI-based instances of Apache to mod_perl not is there any really comprehensive “when the following step works, you’ve done it” kind of diagnostic, nor is there any “if this is happening, it’s not working.”
And this still isn’t working, apparently. The perl stuff is faster, true, but access to all the static html is blocked. So the httpd.conf file is wrong but I have no idea right now how to fix that.
I really really hate these bland “one simple command and you’re done” instruction pages.