Is the long term plan to submit it as a patch/replacement for vars.pm ?

No. Theoretically it is possible to incorporate the 2nd form of usage, but I doubt the p5p would accept that patch, and frankly I would rather not deal with p5p. If vars.pm was patched, people would be forced to write stuff like use vars 1.02 [ '$VERSION' => 4.4 ]; and the p5p would be in charge of maintenance. Sure, much like ExtUtils::MakeMaker I *could* distribute vars.pm like a regular CPAN distribution, but i'd rather not do that (at least for now).

It is backwards compatible with vars.pm, is it not ?

It is not backwards compatible with vars.pm. If you look at the documentation you will see how the usage differs.

MJD says you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo! I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6x+5.8x. I take requests. ** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.