title: Perl: What is the meaning of "Could not read metadata file"?
body: <p>On updating my Perl installation on several Debian and Ubuntu servers, I noticed that some of them print out the line "Could not read metadata file" at the end:</p>
  
  <pre><code># perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::CPAN'
  CPAN: Storable loaded ok (v2.20)
  Reading '/root/.cpan/Metadata'
    Database was generated on Wed, 05 Mar 2014 13:06:14 GMT
  CPAN: YAML loaded ok (v0.90)
  Reading 53 yaml files from /root/.cpan/build/
  CPAN: Time::HiRes loaded ok (v1.9719)
  ................................DONE
  Restored the state of none (in 0.9880 secs)
  CPAN: Module::CoreList loaded ok (v2.18)
  ExtUtils::MakeMaker is up to date (6.90).
  Test::Harness is up to date (3.30).
  ExtUtils::CBuilder is up to date (0.280212).
  File::Temp is up to date (0.2304).
  Test::More is up to date (1.001002).
  Data::Dumper is up to date (2.145).
  IO::Compress::Base is up to date (2.064).
  Compress::Zlib is up to date (2.064).
  IO::Zlib is up to date (1.10).
  Archive::Tar is up to date (1.96).
  Module::Build is up to date (0.4205).
  File::Spec is up to date (3.40).
  Digest::SHA is up to date (5.87).
  File::HomeDir is up to date (1.00).
  Archive::Zip is up to date (1.37).
  Net::FTP is up to date (2.79).
  Term::ReadKey is up to date (2.31).
  Term::ReadLine::Perl is up to date (1.0303).
  YAML is up to date (0.90).
  Parse::CPAN::Meta is up to date (1.4414).
  Text::Glob is up to date (0.09).
  CPAN is up to date (2.00).
  File::Which is up to date (1.09).
  CPAN: CPAN::Meta loaded ok (v2.120351)
  Could not read metadata file. Falling back to other methods to determine prerequisites
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I googled, but couldn´t find anything helpful. Guessing that this is nothing I would need to worry about, I am still interested in what this actually means (and how I can get rid of it).</p>