(Up-to-date source of this post.)
Anyone can contribute to CPAN. It is also pretty huge. This means you might want to separate the wheat from the chaff. To do that these hints might help:
What's the code activity? The more the better.
How many issues do we have? The open bugs show community involvement, the closed ones are about the maintainer's diligence.
What aboout the quality and quantity of tests and their results.
Are there any reverse dependencies (they use the same basic principle as Google PageRank)? The more the better.
Follow the advice of experts in the Perl field, ex. Task::Kensho.
NOTE: don't check any of the hints above in isolation but all/more of them together.
Resources:
- https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/logindec1410_blank-edelman.pdf