These are the most widely used UNIX distributions in the open source world today (OSX Panther & Fedora Core 1) so I can't see how I have a non-standard Perl on either of them.
Coding my own solution isn't the alternative. PHP is - and I don't like to have to change but the more Perl modules fail to compile on standard UNIX platforms the more I think it wiser to go for a language which has most of what you need in the core installation.
Some modules have compiled OK but they seem to be the smaller ones like Mail::Sendmail
My point about excessive modularity is born-out, I would argue, by what appears to be a host of version headaches revolving around Apache1 and 2. The mod_perl developers seem to have had a hard time getting version 2 out, not that I belittle their efforts in any way.