Firstly I'd suggest that almost all Linux, Unix, or *BSD variants should be able to install directly from CPAN. However many people dislike that if they have a packaging system in place upon their host.

It can get problematic if you, say, install Perl modules from CPAN but your distribution has a perl upgrade and breaks them all. In that case using the packages provided for your distributions may be the best bet. (That is what I recommend anyway.)

So from that point of view I find using Debian nice and simple. Many modules are packaged as .deb binary files, with a nice naming convention so they are easy to find.

e.g. HTML::Template -> libhtml-template-perl, CGI::Application -> libcgi-application-perl.

For the modules which aren't available as Debian packages you can easily create them - just by using a wrapper tool around CPAN's scripts:

• Creating Debian binary packages of Perl modules

The short version is:

apt-get install dh-make-perl build-essential
dh-make-perl --build --cpan HTML::Template
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