I appreciate all the good comments that have come from this thread but I don't buy its premise that the CPAN is unusable.

Learning to use the CPAN is one of the key aspects of becoming a good Perl programmer. There is no tool in the world that is going to automate people doing their homework. That means reading articles and books; getting to know contributors that you trust (and in some cases fear); looking at their homepages; playing with the examples they provide and creating some of your own.

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