I'm not really against distributing a pre-configured Config.pm to each host, it just appears that, to do so, I would need to check the remote perl version to determine where to put it and, once I'm to the point of calling perl -v, parsing its output, building the right path, and putting Config.pm there, then it would be simpler and more reliable to just fire up the CPAN shell, say "no" if it asks about manual config, and then exit from it.