Yeah I saw this already, problem is PDE is mostly abandoned, and many things don't work anymore.

There is an amazing shortage of bug reports for the distribution, though. Can you share some cases? I wonder if the author even knows what doesn't work anymore?

Anyway, his perldoc stuff seems to work quite fine on Windows, so it's hard for me to get motivated to duplicate that work.

There are also other projects/bundles

...In quite similar state of decay, I guess? EmacsWiki has a rich list of stuff that seems to have worked at some point in time.

That's why I'd rather prefer decomposing features into modules which can be maintained independently...

I've been through this cycle at least three times in my career. Decomposing without commitment and governance leads to independent bitrot. At some time, the multitude of module versions fail to cooperate with each other, and the trend goes to "this can't be managed any more, we need an intergrated solution". The Emacs repository, for example, is a monstrosity. But only the fact that cperl-mode is part of that monstrosity has ensured that cperl-mode still works with Emacs 28, while many of the independent features, including forks of cperl-mode, turned out to be not sufficiently maintained.

I guess I'll contact the authors of some of those independently more-or-less maintained packages and ask them about their plans. Maybe some stuff just needs to be buried for good.

Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness. -- Terry Pratchett