Re: My preferred way of handling config data in Perl is:

[jonadab]

require './config.pl';

After all, sometimes the configuration needs to calculate values or define objects or subroutines (e.g., a callback). An .ini file just can't handle those needs. And sometimes defining a set of related options together, e.g. with map, improves the clarity of the config file, and .ini can't do that, either.