There have been a few times when I have had to eschew the help of the Net:: or Mail:: modules because I was trying to do things that the modules ... ummmm ... were not really designed to do ( no, really, I was forging mail headers in the cause of good - namely, so the whining users couldn't reply to my email ). I likely could have dug deep into the documentation and figured out how to get the module to jump through the hoops I needed, but it was ( in that case alone ) honestly easier for me to write my own little nasty function to do the work.

I have also been on a few projects where the idea was to ship a module such that it could run on any perl. However, we developed the habit ( if they were pure perl modules ) of either including them in the distro or ( horror ) embedding them directly into the file we distributed ( again, please believe me that the original authors were given full credit and no attempt was made to imply I was smart enough to write all the code ).

There are a few excuses for not using CPAN. They are very few though, and CGI.pm is simply not one of them. That has been part of the core since at least 5.003.

mikfire