Please excuse my lack of knowledge of the ways of CPAN, for I have yet to have written anything I felt worthy of contributing, but I have a question as one from the user perspective.

How would this affect those who, for whatever reason, must find modules for use with older versions of perl (such as 5.005.03, for instance)? I know recently on a system in production I had to install several modules where I had to go through two or more older implementations before I could find one that would install in such as case, although at the moment I do not recall which modules were involved.

Not that I object to cleaning CPAN if the need is there, but wondering what the effects would be.