Don't use CPAN? What heresy is this? Where's the real monastery and how did this impostor manage to take its place?

Personally, at home, I do prefer to use Debian's package repository to install modules rather than going to CPAN for them. In the current case, though, I'm working with a client whose change management policy makes it cumbersome to install packages from the OS vendor, but CPAN flies under its radar, so that's the admin team's preference. Also, the current *nix environment is a mix of Red Hat and HP-UX, with an influx of Solaris looking likely in the mid-term future; although RH seems likely to have several modules packaged, I'm not so sure that I'd expect the same from HP and Sun. This mixed environment would also obviously complicate any attempt at setting up a (set of) master build box(es) unless it's restricted to only pure-Perl modules.

CPAN may not be the best solution (doing a separate make on each host is inefficient, if nothing else), but it works well enough.