Creating RPMs from Perl CPAN Modules

I try my absolute best to always install software on my Linux boxes as RPMs, installed through Yum (yes, I use CentOS on servers and Fedora on my desktops/laptops). Not only is this more-or-less required to sanely manage configuration through Puppet, but it also lets me recreate a machine, or install dependencies for something, in one simple command line. Unfortunately, I run quite a bit of Perl code, and there are a lot of CPAN Perl modules that aren’t in any of the usual CentOS/Fedora repositories.

Enter cpan2rpm: a Perl script that, in its simplest invocation, downloads a specified CPAN module and automatically builds RPMs and SRPMs for it. The original version by Erick Calder hasn’t been touched since 2005, but there’s a newer version from Mediaburst, cpan2rpmmb, that seems to incorporate some nice improvements and worked quite well for me.