Regarding my previous question about appending directories to @INC instead of prepending to it, I guess what I really want is for Perl to load the latest version of modules.

For deployment convenience, I ship CPAN modules with my application so that a minimum Perl installation can quickly run the application. In my application scripts I add "use lib '/path/to/bundled/cpan'". However, some of the included CPAN modules might get a bit out of date (I try to update the bundled CPAN as often as possible, but still...) and the system's CPAN module version might be newer.

What I would like is for Perl to keep searching entries in @INC and compare the versions of all modules found, and then use the latest one.

I know that doing this might open a whole can of worms (for example, the recent LWP 6.00 incompatibilities), but in general it has worked quite well so far in my case.

And I also would like to exclude this behaviour for some modules, since I also have a couple of patched CPAN modules that I want to use regardless of new version from CPAN.

Any ready-made solution I can use? Module::Load::* seems to be able to be slightly modified to do what I need, but I don't want to change all the "use" statements in my scripts/libraries. What would be ideal is probably custom hook in @INC.

Some imagined syntax:

use lib::latest "/path/to/bundled/cpan", "/another", -exclude => qr/^(
+Email::Valid|LWP::protocol::)$/;

# Foo::Bar should be searched in all @INC entries, and the latest vers
+ion used
use Foo::Bar;

# the first found @INC is used, which will be in /path/to/bundled/cpan
use Email::Valid;
[download]