On properly packaging perl

You are right in general.

But you are wrong in the context. We are not talking about a package and random modification to it. We are talking about a programming language.

Perl 5 doesn't have any specification. There are not distro types. Perl 5 is a Perl 5 only when the whole shebangs from tarball is installed. Otherwise you run into the possibility that 3rd party script depending on standard (present in tarball) module will not run - because RH decided that it's not needed.

To exemplify. Imagine that RH had installed GCC but decided to exclude /usr/include/stdio.h. Yes, they have very right to do it. It's all open source. But it would break compilation of more or less every C/C++ program.

Perl 6 which has proper specification (separating mandatory modules from extras) shouldn't have the problem. But for Perl 5 - the tarball is the specification. Deviating from it means only pains for its users.