Scripted installs

[Paul Makepeace]

What's the state of the art in terms of repeatably installing Perl
software? In particular something that's intelligent enough to be
pointed a Makefile.PL and work out deps etc and bundle all that up.

Specifically, I'd like to get to a point I can bring up a Catalyst +
Apache + goodies on a new VM with as little documentation as possible.
I'm downloading random stuff on CPAN right now, and having it ask me
all sorts of fiddly questions ("do you want to install GET as an
alias?" -- argh!) is making me want to put the answers to in a file,
or some other way that I can say "run this script" and have it Just
Work.

The VM in question is a Debian 'box' at Bytemark so I'm not at all
averse to something involving .deb.

http://search.cpan.org/~smueller/PAR-Packer-0.978/lib/pp.pm looks neat.

Thanks,
P