Are people still complaining about the version number? If only there were a simple way to get people talking about Perl again. Personally, I think the best approach would be to (1) recognize that every language has a CPAN equivakent so stop using it as a unique selling proposition (or, at least make it better than everyone else's), and (2) keep implementing cool things in Perl. Prove that Perl programs that do a lot of things (1) are maintainable, and (2) don't have to be as large as the equivalent in other languages. Arguing about the version number just isn't enough.
Npm. It's meant for Node-js code, but you can use it to make sure modules are installed in your source directory for a website. Aside from npm, there are public CDNs available ( http://www.jsdelivr.com/ and https://cdnjs.com/ ).
