You really can't judge a module by its version number or by how often it gets updated. What does it tell you that Data::Compare is now at version 1.19? Nothing. If you look at the release history on search.cpan.org you'll see that it went straight from 0.17 to 1.18. If you look at the changes in that release, you'll see that there were only a few very minor changes, far less significant than those between 0.05 and 0.06. You'll also see that it spent two years as version 0.13, two and a bit years at 0.02, and two years at 0.01.

And if those two year gaps weren't enough to convince you that activity isn't necessarily a sign of a good module, look at Statistics::SerialCorrelation (not updated for 4.5 years) or Tie::Scalar::Decay (not updated for 7 years).

The best things to look at IMO are:

• other programmers' recommendations, so ask your local perl mongers
• CPAN-testers results
• portability
• dependencies
• the rather confusing advanced search on rt.cpan.org, which *may* let you see how quickly reported bugs get fixed. Although that won't include bugs reported directly to the author by email.

Some of those - especially portability and dependencies - are somewhat subjective, of course. It's my opinion, for example, that a module that works on lots of different platforms is higher quality than one that does the same job but only on a few platforms - I think it shows either that the author has better coding practices, or that he cares more. And a module with lots of dependencies, while it does demonstrate admirable code re-use and avoids reinventing wheels badly, could also be harder to install and is subject to bugs that may be introduced later in its dependencies especially if those dependencies have poor test coverage.