That’s not a clear win. Because much CPAN-related infrastructure insists on a single dash, almost all modules have a single hyphen, which means the more fastidious form picks up nearly all descriptions correctly. If you allow multiple hyphens, you recover some false negatives, at the cost of some false positives, where the description of the module is malformed but there’s a line with multiple hyphens somewhere nearby. Matching ' --? ' at that point has a couple fewer false positives and still almost no false negatives.

But because of the effect of CPAN’s rules, it’s hardly worth bothering either way, and I prefer to get output that’s consistent with other tools.

Makeshifts last the longest.

I also noticed that if a module has a corresponding POD file (for example: POSIX.pm and POSIX.pod) the description is in the POD file and won't get picked up at all. I applied this patch which seems to fix this (it also prevents POSIX.pm from appearing twice in the resulting list):

202,204c202,206
<                               return unless /\.p(?:m|od)\z/;
<                               s/\.pod\z/.pm/; # if it's POD, parse t
+he corresponding code
<                               return if not -f;
---
>                               return unless -f and /\A(.+)\.pm\z/;
>                               my $module = $1;
>                               my $version = get_module_version( "$mo
+dule.pm" )                 || -e "$module.pod" && get_module_version(
+ "$module.pod" );
>                               my $desc    = get_module_description( 
+"$module.pm", $opt_limit ) || -e "$module.pod" && get_module_descript
+ion( "$module.pod", $opt_limit );
> 
207,209c209,211
<                                       get_module_version( $_ ),
<                                       get_module_description( $_, $o
+pt_limit ),
<                                       $opt_path ? $File::Find::name 
+: undef,
---
>                                       $version,
>                                       $desc,
>                                       $opt_path ? $File::Find::name 
+: undef
[download]

HTH