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Perl has a strong historical connection with Unix, and the distribution
methods that currently exist serve this community well: 'do-it-yourself'
types who are accustomed to obtaining their software over the Internet and
building it from source.  CPAN has greatly simplified the process of locating
and building Perl extensions from source, and having this well-designed
source repository has undoubtedly contributed to Perl's past and present
popularity.

But platforms such as Macintosh and Windows make up the vast majority of
desktop workstations, as well as an ever-growing percentage of the server
market, and the users of these platforms typically have a different set
of expectations regarding their software than does an experienced Perl
programmer.  These users typically install binary versions of software
onto their systems, usually with the aid of an installation program.

We now have a number of binary distributions for the Perl core for these
platforms.  But one problem remains: how to give users on these platforms
access to the vast library of Perl modules and extensions that have been
written and made available on CPAN?  This document describes how we intend
to solve this problem for Windows users.  We offer it as a proposal for a