Now you sound if you have some obligation to some "community"...CPAN has just one requirement: uploaded code should be freely distributable. That's all. No requirement that it should support CPAN.pm, CPANPLUS.pm, MakeMaker or Module::Build. It's following the Perl spirit, it's only asking you to be nice. But you don't have to.

For anything that is meant to be useful for a community, there is a point when community mores naturally come into play. I think that it is fair to expect that code placed on CPAN should make a good faith attempt to be easily installable on most systems or have documented why it is not.

So is it OK to put intentional malware on CPAN as long as the license is acceptable?

Probably not, but not having a Makefile.PL doesn't make it "intentional malware".

For anything that is meant to be useful for a community,

Not everything placed on CPAN is meant to be useful for a community. Some people place code on CPAN because the code was useful for them, and they just put it there because it might be useful for others. But it isn't driven by the mentality of "doing it for the good of the community".

I don't believe in this "community" thing. I just happen to work with Perl and I'm willing to share some my code, experience and knowledge. But I only doing because it make me feel good, and not because of some sixties "community" idea where I'd feel obliged to service them according to some rulebook.

Abigail

I think that the word "community" has excess baggage for you which was not my intention to dredge up.

Of course you don't do anything because it is "for the community". Virtually nobody does. Functioning communities operate because the members have other reasons for being there, and they operate well because there are other incentives driving that which align well enough with the good of the community to serve. This is the case whether we are talking about a community which is a company, city, nation, members of an online forum, or devotees of a programming language.

Those other reasons are maintained by community mechanisms. In online communities, the desire to avoid being criticized by other members of the community is one of those mechanisms. And in the grand scheme of things, this is one of the nicer mechanisms by which real communities get maintained.

For lots more about this, the best book I have read recently on communities is The Logic of Collective Action. Highly recommended if you are interested in both economics and how communities work.