Distro packages are often a bit behind the official releases. I prefer to develop in the most recent version of a framework / library, as it generally makes things a bit more future proof.

What collyw said. And most people prefer to use their own installation of Perl (see perlbrew) instead of the system Perl for development. The same seems to go for other scripting environments.

nope, cpan is a fast changing target. You can make it easy on yourself by building your own perl (with perlbrew, super easy) and managing your cpan modules with cpanminus. The system perl is for the system, your perl is for you.