Ovid++ brilliant insight.

I think that you have highlighted the main drawback of Perl, and why it is losing favour for "enterprise applications". CPAN is both Perl's great strength and its great weakness. Having an application that requires a gazillion dependencies, all of which could break the install, is a nightmare that is beyond the ken of most people outside the Perl community.

I recently attended an evening presentation on web frameworks in London. Presented were Catalyst, Django (Python) and Ruby on Rails. Catalyst did not come across well to the audience, except for the Perl geeks who know and love Template Toolkit, Class::DBI, etc. The Perl "solution" came across as a Lego (or perhaps Meccano) kit to build websites with - lots of choices, flexibility, and it really can make you a cup of tea (if you install Catalyst::Plugin::TeaMaker :) ).

Both Django and Rails came across as slick presentations with end user application demos that certainly impressed me, and I think a large chunk of the audience including the Perl geeks. This event has been discussed subsequently on the london.pm mailing list.

Solving the packaging problem is something I am very interested in, and is the subject of a talk I have given, and intend to repeat on Saturday at the London Perl Workshop.