Well, it seems there is a bug in the latest version of perl that is causing this. As a temporary workaround I installed perl version 5.10 in $HOME/localperl. Then I edited innobackupex-1.5.1 and changed the header to point to my local copy of perl. Once the perl folks get past this nonsense I'll reinstall the xtrabackup rpm. By that time there will probably be an updated xtrabackup anyway.

It's not perl. It's innobackupex-1.5.1. It assumed version string from perl is numeric. In 5.12 it returns, "v5.12.0". All you need to do is comment out the version checking stuff in innobackupex-1.5.1.

like so:

} else {
$perl_version = chr($required_perl_version[0])
. chr($required_perl_version[1])
. chr($required_perl_version[2]);
#if ($^V lt $perl_version) {
#my $version = chr(48 + $required_perl_version[0])
# . "." . chr(48 + $required_perl_version[1])
# . "." . chr(48 + $required_perl_version[2]);
#print STDERR "$prefix Warning: " .
# "Your perl is too old! Innobackup requires\n";
#print STDERR "$prefix Warning: perl $version or newer!\n";
#}
}

oops dbl post