Would generalising the approach taken by the FreeBSD ports tree in their
treatment of Perl packages be useful? As far as I can see the same issue
will impact many other languages which have some sort of 'modular'
approach.

I don't have a FreeBSD box, however a friend tells me that their system
doesn't have hand-generated package definitions for Perl modules - they
do some 'magic' to generate a ports package directly from CPAN somehow
... from memory this hooks into the Perl module install phase too ...

My greatest issue with the above system would be keeping abreast of
the general drift of CPAN ... on the plus side though, we wouldn't run
into cases where the pkgsrc package definition references files in CPAN
which no longer exist as they're out of date (although to be fair,
ftp.netbsd.org generally has them cached)

Would this be worth it? Unfortunately beyond proposing the idea I have
no thoughts on how to achieve this ...

-- 
Malcolm Herbert                                This brain intentionally
mjch@mjch.net                                                left blank