our clients are expected to have this version available to be able to run our software
You seem to have a significantly different business model and customers to us (I'd be interested to learn more about your business model BTW).
Our customers are not technical, could not care less about Perl (and we would not trust them to install Perl or CPAN modules) ...
so we bundle a specific Perl version, along with all CPAN modules we need, in such a way so as to not
interfere with the system Perl - as described in my reply to putting perl and modules in your source code repository.
This approach ensures our software works-out-of-the-box, even without root permissions,
and even on systems that do not have Perl installed.
It further simplifies support because it is easy to set up test environments in our office identical to what
the customer is using.
