Personally, I used the "I'm staying at Schwern's place and asked him" form of the documentation. So perhaps it's an unofficially-supported feature...

One of the long-standings problems with the Makefile.PL command line invocation is that it's really an API, but nobody has formalised it or told anyone.

There's a long-standing assumption by the CPAN clients that you can just pass in the same params to everything (which is why that CPAN/Config.pm setting exists) and a long-standing assumption by module authors that you can ask the user to provide you anything you like as a param to Makefile.PL.

The former is actually the more-correct, since in the general case there IS no user to read your docs and type stuff into Makefile.PL. And any module that HAS to have a user type in stuff is more of less incompatible with the CPAN.

I believe one of Schwern's "improving the CPAN" tasks was to try and properly codify the Makefile.PL "API".

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