Add to this the unfathomable inability of CPAN.pm to download the MIRRORED.BY file. I've known CPAN.pm go through almost my whole list of mirrors failing to download the damned thing and when I've checked the URL the file is right there on the FTP server where it ought to be. Why is this allowed to go on? I can't be the only one going through this nonesense. As I said at the start this kind of thing is setting back the adoption of Perl. Developers who are not fully committed to doing whatever it takes to get Perl modules installed are going to eventually use something else. Perl will only have itself to blame if it becomes marginalised.