I always start out trying to stick with RPM packages when using a fresh RH/CentOS box and every single time I end up having to pull modules from CPAN because the shrinkwrapped ones simply don't work or miss out on dependencies.

Last time it happed was just a few days ago when I tried to install HTML::Mason and Apache::Request was missing. The official repo had no RPM for my platform and so I had to install about 25-30 modules from CPAN anyway. The RPM'ed HTML::Mason ofcourse refused to work with those, so I had to reinstall that from CPAN as well.

Long story short: Just bite the compile bullet and install from CPAN right away, because that's what you'll end up doing anyway.

Just my 0.02€