I'm doing some market research for Stratopan, which is an experimental service for hosting private CPAN-like repositories of Perl modules in the cloud. I'd like to know how you manage the upgrade and deployment of CPAN modules in your world. Some of the techniques I've seen are:

• Install from a local mini CPAN
• Vendor packages (RPM, PPM, Debian Pkgs)
• Install directly from public CPAN
• Stash the tarballs from CPAN in version control
• Build the modules directly into our source tree
• Use carton and/or cpanfile
• Don't use any CPAN modules
• Never upgrade any CPAN modules
• The sysadmins do everything

Aside from helping me, your answers will shed some light on how CPAN modules are handled in the wild, which could lead to some insights on how to improve the tool chain. Just this past weekend at the QA Hackathon, there was much discussion about improving the CPAN infrastructure, so your feedback will be really helpful to them.

Thanks for your time,

-Jeff