When a module become standard, that attitude changes somewhat.

But that's a really bad reason to make something part of the standard distribution. Then you'd put thousands of tiny little module into the standard distribution.

When does a module qualify as a standard module for you?

IMO, the only modules that should be part of the standard distributions are modules that:

• Have a tight integration with the perl core. (strict, IO::*, Unicode stuff, B::*, etc).
• Are necessary (or useful) to download and install other modules (CPAN, ExtUtils::*, etc).
• Anything that's needed to make Perl "Perl": Exporter, Carp, English, etc.

So, IMO, many modules already part of the core shouldn't be there: Benchmark, Getopt, Memoize, Switch, etc. Anything that lives, or can live, independently on CPAN doesn't need to be in the main Perl distribution.

Note that I'm not advocating to remove any module from the core. I'm only saying that mistakes from the past shouldn't be repeated.