in reply to cpanm installs ExtUtils::MakeMaker again and again on FreeBSD
Sam Tregar, in his Apress book, Writing Modules for CPAN addresses the type of email and bug reports a module maintainer might receive:
The e-mail you'll receive falls roughly into two categories--useful and bewildering. The useful e-mail will contain feature requests, bug reports, and questions. In the second category, you'll find e-mail that sounds like a bug report but doesn't contain nearly enough information for you to be sure--usually something along the lines of "it doesn't work!!!"
So if you haven't had a response after attempting to contact the author and/or maintainer of App::cpanminus, you may want to ask yourself which category your report fell into.
First, consider how you submitted the report. Did your report to the porters at freebsd.org make it to the right person? Was it detailed enough? Would it have been more appropriate to submit the bug report to the Github 'Issues' list for cpanminus, or the rt.cpan.org cpanminus page? I didn't see your issue mentioned on either of those lists, though I suppose you might have disguised it under a different subject line. But one of those two lists are where I would expect to find a serious bug report.
It's certainly not impossible that you've discovered a bug in cpanminus, although it seems to be passing its own test suite on 445 out of 446 smoke testers systems. But passing a test suite doesn't mean anything more than the fact that the module passes all the tests that are currently bundled with it. Often as bugs are reported additional tests are added to suites to demonstrate the bug and that it has been fixed. Module maintainers love getting bug reports that contain concise tests, and even better patches with tests.
At any rate, my suggestion is to try to present your case as clearly as possible to the github issues list, or the rt list, and then wait for a response.
Dave