That "shipping" problem you describe is not at all Perl specific.

I wholeheartedly agree, Abigail. And I would further submit that this issue is not confined to Open Source softare either. Such issues also occur with closed source or commercial softwere where the vendor is dependant you your having third party software installed as well as their own. For instance code that is dependant on one version or another of the Sun JDK such as for Java servlet engines.

The fix is language agnostic: just ship everything you need.

Which for some most cases works just fine. To make matters worse are compatability issues you can run into. For instance I remember a commercial package that would only work with an very ancient version of Perl. And it expected that version to be in /usr/bin/perl. If it had been scripts only that were the issue I could have munged that, but NO! they had embed it in there C code as something like

       exec ("/usr/bin/perl",@ARGS);
[download]

to kick off their scripts.

Thankfully their product was replaced by someone else's product...