Because a distro, any distro, normally creates packages that relate somehow to other packages, even the perl package sometimes, I normally seperate my programming environment from the systems.

I install perl (from perl.org) and any supporting modules to another location, as an example '/opt/local'. Then running CPAN (or CPANPLUS) using that perl installation, will install all the modules into /opt/local/lib.

At that point I can update my libs without any effect on the system and vice versa. Just be sure all of your scripts start with #!/opt/local/bin/perl.