Like most serious Perl people, CPAN is the main reason I still use Perl after all this time. This huge, wonderful library of Perl code usually helps me avoid reinventing any wheels. On the other hand, the standard CPAN client is one of my most regular hate objects when coding Perl.
It's not that it lacks any features I need, rather the opposite, the damn thing has a million options, and no good defaults. CPANPLUS is only adding to this mess with even more options. However, now there's a better solution.
Check out miyagawa's new CPAN client cpanminus. And when I say check out, I mean it literally. Get it from github so you won't have to bother configuring the default cpan shell again:
$ git clone git://github.com/miyagawa/cpanminus.git
You might want to use one of the tagged releases rather than master tho. Install it in the regular way (perl Makefile.PL && make install) and you're good to go. Using it is a breeze:
Command-Central:cpanminus marcus$ cpanm Mojo
Fetching http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/K/KR/KRAIH/Mojolicious-0.999921.tar.gz
Building and testing Mojolicious-0.999921 for Mojo...
Mojo installed successfully.
cpanminus gives you all the information you want and nothing more, and it asks no questions. If you want to see the full build output, you can check out ~/.cpanm/build.log