Writing Solid CPAN Modules

Writing a rock-solid general-purpose CPAN module is hard. Very hard. After all, such modules are expected to work flawlessly in a wide variety of environments -- many of which the author may have no experience in.

To illustrate how hard it can be to write a module that works in many different environments, consider two recent examples. Schwern gushes here about the joy he derives from coaxing his lovingly crafted Test::More module to work faultlessly in multi-threaded environments -- even though he never uses threads himself. And in CHECK and INIT under mod_perl, Ovid reminds us that writing a CPAN module that works smoothly in a mod_perl environment is not trivial.

To help those CPAN authors less experienced than an Ovid or a Schwern, I've tried to provide some tips and links on improving CPAN module quality.