In dependencies, we should allow dependencies of type ‘perl’ that will fetch Perl modules from CPAN for projects that use Perl.
Additionally, to support the above, we should consider adding a cpan() as a repository method that will look up the Perl CPAN repositories for dependecies of type perl and download them.
Are there any news or plans on this topic? I’m new to Gradle, but need to manage Java- and Perl-projects as well, so came across the same question.
For my use-case it would be enough already if one could simply describe dependencies for different purposes, like with api vs. implementation vs. testImplementation for plugin java-library, and let either some frontend for CPAN or some package manager like APT actually resolve and download all those dependencies. that’s what I’m doing currently, preferring APT with CPAN as fallback. Not sure if letting CPAN/APT handle downloads etc. makes anything easier, though. 
At least some of my Perl-projects support automatic tests based on Test::Class, Test::Most etc., so I would expect Gradle being able to run those as part of some build, collect results, abort the build etc. Pretty much what it’s doing with Java already again.
Any ideas/hints on where one would need to look at if one would plan to implement such things on its own? I guess I would need to start at the concept of plugins like java-library? Anything else obviously of interest? Or is it already known that Perl can not be supported at all?
Thanks for your input!