Yeah - Parse::BACKPAN::Packages works pretty well, but it would still be nice not to have to download the packages in order to query their contents. Right now I'm using that to determine the dist files, downloading them from BACKPAN and then using CPAN::ParseDistribution to determine the modules contained in dist file.

My specific problem to solve is that I have a module name (e.g. MIME::Decoder::NBit, and I want to find all distribution files which provide that module (with the module version number.)

There's a lot of data to store, but once collected it won't ever change (it'll just get added to as new modules are added to BACKPAN.) It would be nice to find a way to compile and distribute it.