In our environment, we have two classes of machines (well, typically 3 or more, but I'm generalizing): development and production. On a development machine, I would expect a compiler and all of the tools I would need to build an application, including all of the necessary modules. On a production machine, we, for example, have no compilers. The machine is locked down and designed only to accept content originating from the development machine. We can get in to fix things, but new binaries or code must come pre-written and ready for use.

Since Perl modules must be built on target platforms, this makes things difficult for us. We have to either resort to a manual installation or just hope that the module doesn't use any non-Perl code and that it can simply be copied to a target directory.

What I would like to see Perl have is not only a way to package modules (or at least dependency information so that the modules can be fetched a la CPAN at application install time), but a way to roll out a set of modules to a production server from a development one.

Note: Code samples are for conceptual use only and generally are not meant to be cut/pasted into a production application. Always 'use strict', have a thorough understanding of the code you use, and check the return values of functions and handle errors according to your needs. - Fastolfe