Software distributions released to the CPAN include a META.json or, for older distributions, META.yml, which describes the distribution, its contents, and the requirements for building and installing the distribution. The data structure stored in the META.json file is described in CPAN::Meta::Spec. CPAN::Meta provides a simple class to represent this distribution metadata (or distmeta), along with some helpful methods for interrogating that data. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/CPAN-Meta/