I'm writing an article on testing Perl 5.12.0 RC 1 for Perl Pub, and my life is much easier thanks to a handful of projects and developers. Thank you to:

local::lib, for supporting per-project module installation directories. I have the system Perl, Perl 5.10.1, and now Perl 5.12.0 RC 1 installed on this test server, and they don't interfere with each other. That's handy!

CPAN::SQLite, for making the CPAN installation process easier. Using a SQLite index is faster and more frugal with memory, especially when I have a pile of distributions to install to test with the software I want to test.

Module::Install, even though I gripe about the software frequently and had to work around a confusing bootstrapping issue, it's worked well since that point to install the software I care about for the project.

Parallel building and testing for Perl 5 itself, as it sped up the installation and testing process for the RC. (Of course, I went to lunch during that phase, but still....)

The new CPAN configuration system, which didn't require me to answer a lot of questions to configure a CPAN mirror and installation system.

I'm definitely doing something more complicated than the default installation of Perl 5, but my input in the process has been to fix things that definitely needed human intervention, not to babysit the process to make decisions where the defaults were fine. This is a definite improvement over last time I had to manage several parallel installations of different Perl 5 versions.

Thanks to everyone who's contributed to these projects.

Update: Chris Prather pointed out App::perlbrew, which would have made my life easier a day ago. See his Brewing Up a Storm for more information.