In many ways CPAN is still state of the art. It has first-class support for namespacing and mirroring, which appears to still elude most environments' packaging systems.
And I'm saying this as someone that dislikes Perl a lot.
And I'm saying this as someone that dislikes Perl a lot.
CPAN is the defacto Perl standard, mirroring and testing built in. With perlbrew, localLib and cpanm, the tooling for Perl is world class. I think Ruby and Python are still catching up here. No doubt they will, but CPAN is an amazing feat of engineering.