- No module may create or remove files outside it's .cpan directory for testing, etc, unless first asking the user...

But I dont use CPAN to install my modules? I would actually rather not allow the creation of files at all without my permission. I think this is a reasonable thing to do, of course the daring could override that behavior with an environmental variable or something.

The natural progression of this is more controversial, especially in the Perl area ... but it would include assurance of test suite quality, code quality, maintainability, and a certain need for the module ...

That seems to the a lot of the goal of the CPAN-QA projects. I think something like this is long overdue. I was surpised by some of the test suites of some of the more popular modules out there. Just looking at Paul Johnson's CPAN code coverage stats, you see an awful lot of red boxes there.

CPAN has some great stuff on it now, but it has a lot of incomplete stuff that should not have been submitted, which just fills up the search results and causes trouble when you are looking for something useful. There are also a lot of dead/broken/abandoned modules.

I am not sure I would advocate the reaping of dead/broken/abandoned unregistered modules. Instead, I would instead suggest that the cpan search be improved to weight more recent modules higher than older seemingly abandoned modules.

However, I would advocate doing this with the registered modules. There seem to be alot of modules that have been registered, but nothing has ever been done with them, they are just placeholders. I think there should be an expiration date on those, if you don't upload any code for a period of time, the namespace comes down and can be used by another.

I am not the one to clean it up, but it (being the greatest thing Perl has going for it), could certaintly use some improvement to harden it up a bit.

Of course, you could not clean it up all on your own. But this is the goal of the CPAN-QA project. You can always help them out (assuming your company allows that kind of stuff).