Speaking of which raises an oft discussed matter: OS-specific-package vs CPAN.pm! Personally I've seen this discussed in CRUX ml to which I'm subscribed (yes, I'm a CRUX user, of course!) - and I think that a solution that would satisfy both those who want to keep track of everything that is installed on their system and of those who prefer to use Perl's specific tool would be that of patching CPAN.pm itself as of to create a (say) CRUX package on the fly before installing. A solution that would be slightly redundant indeed, but that as I implied would give the best of both words.

The proposed solution would be particularly simple as of CRUX due to the KISS nature of its packages, but I think it would be doable with other distros as well.

The key point: however I'm not sure how easy and most importantly how {reliable,maintainable} patching CPAN.pm would be, so I wonder if it could not expose suitable "hooks" for such an "enhancement" instead, say something along the lines of

perl -MCPAN=CRUX -e shell
[download]

where of course there should be an OS-specific CRUX.pm available somewhere in @LIB, or something like that...