in reply to Distribute script with dependencies
What's the difference between distributing a binary and a script?
What I'm planning on doing, with AIX no less, is to have version control contain the source to perl and 160+ modules, plus another repository with my actual code in it. We build the code, tar it up, and distribute it. I do not want to use the system perl because that creates headaches. First off, it's too old - AIX 7 comes with perl 5.10.1. Second, it can change outside of my control: an AIX update could add or remove stuff, including introducing a fix I'm not compatible with.
In my case, we already have the "non-free proprietary IBM compiler" so that isn't the issue. But it's far better to ship your own copy of perl with your code. Then you don't need to worry about the OS compiler, or anything else. It also makes updating AIX easier - going from AIX 6 to AIX 7 broke some of our stuff and we had to build stuff separately for the two because we were building for the system perl (5.8.8 vs 5.10.1).