As someone who is making money to pay for the studies by freelancing (as in writing web apps using Perl) I agree with Mark.

And what I do is exactly that - bundle all those modules that are used with the code that I wrote. But unfortunately that is only part of the problems that Perl for Web is facing :(

Even that technique still requires that the end user is messing up with some *.cgi or *.pl files to set up the shebang line ... and to chmod it. So I usually install the applications myself. As I use CGI::App ;) it's only one file that dispatches to modules.

The other great problem is performance. CGI is out because of it performance problems, yet mod_perl still isn't quite suitable for any "Joe" on shared hosting. Mod_php still does it much better. I admit, it doesn't give you the power that mod_perl does - but Joe doesn't care ...

Sure there are other solutions like FastCGI or _____ (just put whatever you like/use here). But do web servers come with that as default? I don't think so - so who (which administrator) would even bother to install that? Especially when php does the job - and is mostly used anyway ...

I believe that Ruby is facing similar performance (CGI vs mod_ruby) problems when it comes to hosting.

When we solve those problems - we can start thinking about better advocating Perl ...

Let's first see what others are doing good and how they are doing it. Then let's adopt it ...