Thanks for asking this Bod. I will focus on how to generally make choices like these.

Judging the Quality of a CPAN module

Warning signs:

• Bad reviews
• Only one release and/or hasn't had releases for many years
• Its test statistics show a lot of failures
• Lots of unresolved bugs
• CPANTS Kwalitee score

Recommended modules:

• Task::Kensho - a list of recommended modules for various tasks, sponsored by the Enlightened Perl Organisation

Discouraged modules:

• Switch (do not use - see perldoc Switch Statements)
• File::Slurp (has a lot of issues, better to slurp manually - see Re^3: Extracting selected fields form file record (don't use File::Slurp References))
• XML::Simple (only useful for a very narrow range of tasks, better modules are: XML::Twig, XML::Rules, XML::LibXML)
• CGI (consider more modern web frameworks, such as Catalyst, Dancer/Dancer2, and Mojolicious)
• Acme (it is almost certainly a very silly idea to use an Acme module in production code! :)

See Also

• Re^3: Perl Code Changes Behavior if Two Subroutine definitions are swapped by haukex (2016, how to tell a good CPAN module from a bad one)
• Criteria for when to use a cpan module by nysus (2019, when should you depend on a CPAN module rather than write your own code?)
• Re: Criteria for when to use a cpan module (Buy vs Build) (my checklist: when to use a CPAN module, when to write your own code)
• Writing Solid CPAN Modules (see especially the "Dependencies" section)
• CPAN Module Evaluation Red-Flags by bsb (2003)

Updated: Minor reorganisation of the material in the original post. Added "See Also" section. Added warning re using Acme modules (thanks cavac).

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.