> There are cases where this is painful, such as offline machines. But in those cases you can pack all of CPAN on a CD (with minicpan), or produce a self-contained Perl program + libraries with local::lib and/or PAR.

Which is pretty much what I have to resort to :(

I don't have to do this for the most part with Java or Python.

PAR is good for deployment, but obviously hard for offline development work (sometimes you just have to do the work on those machines).

Thanks for the pointer to minicpan. I might give that a shot, might save me from manually mirroring CPAN.