I've found that what I really want is the ability to install, centrally, multiple versions of perl modules and have a way for scripts to point at which version of each (non-core) module they want. It is a pain having to enumerate the version of each module you want, but without this, upgrading any module is a potential downtime.
Even if all modules signaled broken backwards compatibility by the version number, which they don't, it wouldn't help this problem because of all the existing scripts, which were written for the old version of the module, may break when you upgrade such a module. You can find most of these scripts by searching for "use SomeModule", but then someone will be clever and load the module at runtime with require... Until perl can (out of the box) deal with this, it's a dangerous thing to use in a large scale environment. Don't get me wrong, I prefer perl, but I'm also sure that anyone who has used perl in an enterprise environment has been bitten by this problem. Things like PAR can help, but they require more effort to package the script for deployment.