ActiveState distribute binary versions of a selection of modules, most of the common ones - but not all of them - which they keep reasonably up to date. It's a relatively simple matter to install them (there's a perl script who's name I've forgotten, which downloads the packages and installs them). If you've actually purchased ActiveState you get a nice GUI which does the same thing as the script.

This would certainly be easier to use than RPM's (who wants to find the RPM's themself?!). And is also easier than using CPAN directly since the user/admin doesn't have to download the package, configure it then compile it.

In reply to the latter part of you message, perhaps take a page from Debian's book and have servers which automatically compile the packages on the server. Then when you install the package it also works out all the dependencies and installs those packages as well (and their dependencies etc).

I do see a major problem with this approach though, there are modules which you want to configure for each machine (location of libraries which it depends upon) which vary. This could be fixed by adding shared librarys to LD_LIBRARY_PATH or /etc/ld.so.conf.

If we could make some nice automated compilation/installation system that would be really neat. I think it's possible too...