But deep down I expected the significant future to be Perl 6.

And I still do. I might be on a lonely position here, but I do think of Perl 6 not only as a successor for Perl 5, but also as a successor for Ruby, TCL, Lisp and a number of other dynamic languages.

We need to start giving Perl version numbers against CPAN modules

FWIW all of my CPAN modules already declare a dependency on a minimal Perl version, by having perl: 5.006001 in my META.yaml, and

require
5.006001;
[download]

So maybe you should be more specific: maybe it's time to track lower and higher version constraints, and make parts of the infrastructure(*) aware of it.

(*) intentionally left vague here, because I'm not yet sure exactly which parts need to be changed.

Let me tell you a short story. Nearly exactly two years ago I uploaded the first Perl 6 module to pause.cpan.org. I had carefully declared a minimal Perl version of 6.0.0. I joined #toolchain on irc.perl.org in order to talk about any problems that might occur.

As one might expect, the attempt didn't work out too well. The indexer didn't know what to make of the Perl 6 Pod dialect, so no docs showed up on search.cpan.org. But still the tarball got distributed to the CPAN mirrors, and was available for download.

This disheartening part was that the overwhelming majority of #toolchain wasn't interested in making anything Perl 6 related work, but demanded that I didn't break anything Perl 5 related. I didn't plan to, and as far as I can tell, I did not. All my plans (which I tried to discuss there) had carefully been designed not to break anythiing for the Perl 5 folks.

All I had was one distribution on CPAN that wasn't indexed correctly, and that no perl 5 tester could run, because their perl version was too low. Still, when I rejoined #toolchain about 15 months later, a pretty vocal and influential member of infrastructure hackers remembered me as "the guy who broke CPAN"

As a result, Perl 6 has started to develop it's own, albeit pretty primitive, module infrastructure in the mean time. Some people from the Perl 5 community did seem genuinely interested, and reminded me not to repeat the mistakes that were made in connection with Perl 5's packaging system, without being able to actually point to concrete mistakes.

When I now read that Damian Conway (and maybe others) want Perl 6 modules on CPAN, I wonder if they believe in fairytales, or if they are connected to a different reality than I am, or if I simply met the wrong people when I started my attempt two years ago, or if something substantially has changed in the mean time.

I'd very much like to see a reuse of resources when building a module distribution system for Perl 6, and I'd very much like to see that happen soon. If anybody can propose concrete steps to drive that effort, I (and many other Perl 6 hackers) am willing to do my best.

I'm just weary of two things: handwaving like "we must fix CPAN", and overdesign that leads to too much effort before a simple installation of a Perl 6 module can actually happen.