Generally PPM is very good at connecting to different repositories, in that way if a package wasn't in the default repository you can look it up in another different one, however, these repositories have to be introduced to ppm, that can be done from either the GUI interface or the PPM console itself. Check this Faq. Then again, to optimize PPM performance, these repos can be activated and deactivated as well.

On another note, if you want to install a package manually, that can be as easy as getting its zipped file and then extracting that file to either perl/site/lib or perl/lib, after that, if you're on a Windows box, you've to have utilities that're similar to make, I tried dmake, nmake and the tools from UnxUtils. Manual installation of packages becomes handy if your machine doesn't have access privileges to connect to these repositories through PPM for example.

Last, as was also suggest, MinGW is an interesting choice as well...