ModPerl::Util::exit: (120000) exit was called at /var/www/mason_example/test.html line 4

We're thinking of upgrading from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2, so I did an install of Apache 2 on a new box. The box is running the Debian/Sarge flavor of Linux and our site runs on Perl/Mason. I used "aptitude" to install most packages; only in a few cases did I need to get Perl modules from CPAN directly. Here are some of the packages I installed:

• apache2
• libapache2-mod-perl2 [ actually version 1.999.21 ]
• libhtml-mason-perl

Aptitude installs version 1.26 of Mason, even though the most recent version of Mason is 1.35. It installs Apache/2.0.54.

Although most of the migration went fine, I quickly ran into trouble in getting an error from a number of my Perl/Mason files. I created a very simple file, test.html, that demonstrates the problem:

<%/init>
print "This is a script.";
exit();
</%init>

On my Apache 1.3 server, which also uses Mason 1.26, the output looks like this:

This is a script.

On my new Apache 2 server, the output looks like this:

ModPerl::Util::exit: (120000) exit was called at /var/www/mason_example/test.html line 3

I don't see why I'm getting this message; it's ok to call exit in mod_perl:

Normally you will use the plain exit() in your code. You don't need to use ModPerl::Util::exit explicitly...

I have searched high and low for the solution to this, and I'm about ready to give up. There are only a few calls to exit() in our scripts, and I can easily run through and change them to return, which seems to eliminate the error/warning message. But I'm amazed that practically no one else has reported this problem, given the fact that my setup was so plain-vanilla.