Jeff (aka @duckyd) gave a presentation about CPAN Awesomeness at last night’s pdx.pm.

Slides are on github!  Your homework is to find them.   Here are some highlights.

There are over 16K modules on the CPAN as of 11 Oct 2009.  Wow.

Jeff’s recommended changes from the default cpan shell configuration:
- auto_commit 1
- prerequisites_policy follow
- build_requires_install_policy yes
- prefer_installer MB (Module::Build)
- change your make_install_make_command and mbuild_install_mbuild_command to include your sudo command.

–

Spend 10 minutes & give something back to CPAN every time you install a module:  Simply set up CPAN::Reporter!

Recommendations:
- make sure that you set cc_author to ‘no’.  (In the latest version, that’s the default.)
- set it to prompt you to edit/send the report if the tests fail.  This way you can judge if the failure is due to your own
boneheadedness.
- you can set the transport value to a file to run reports without sending them.
- for help:  perldoc CPAN::Reporter::Config

For automatic continuous testing, set up CPAN::Reporter::Smoker.  (Doesn’t actually install anything, justs runs tests.)

Recommendations:
- don’t run it as root;  you are the canary in the coal mine.
- create a dedicated user that has essentially no privs on your machine.
- run it on a separate Perl install (core modules only).
- this is a cool place to use that RAND option for prefer_installer in CPAN.

–

Another cool tip that I REALLY DIG because I have systems with multiple perls & users associated with them:
Set your shebang line to:

#!/usr/bin/env perl