Yum broke Perl on CentOS 5

During a recent Yum update that was long overdue, my perl scripts stopped working talking about missing XS versions of certain perl modules.

Specifically it broke my script that uses Mail::Box::Manager and complained about a dependency fail in Mail::Box::Reporter that needed an XS version that is missing.

I thought I would re-install Mail::Box::Manager. While trying to manually compile Mail::Box::Manager (since CPAN won't install without force, which is a bad idea if something is really broken), one of the first warnings given is

--
!!!! WARNING !!!! On your system, the module Scalar::Util is installed
!!!! WARNING !!!! without use of XS. This means that critical functionality
!!!! WARNING !!!! is missing. Reinstall the module and be sure to get the
!!!! WARNING !!!! correct installation.
!!!! WARNING !!!! perl -MCPAN -e 'shell'
!!!! WARNING !!!! > force install Scalar::Util
--

This led to the bug below that recommends force installing Scalar::Util via CPAN, since CentOS RPMs don't have this and is missing the XS version.
http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=2434

Force installing Scalar::Util as indicated worked. Phew! Took me 2 days to research this, but finding a simple solution to fix everything is great. :)