Who needs CPAN with Drupal and the Update Status module (http://drupal.org/project/update_status). Using this module, it's really a no brainer to keep your site up to date with all the latest updates to the Drupal core and contributed modules you have installed. It'll tell you which modules needs an update, the severity (e.g. Security related), and if there are some optional (typically beta or "dev") versions available. To make things easy, you can even have it email you when there are updates available. And there is of course a GUI component as well, which lets you instantly view the status of all the modules.

It's a must have for any Drupal adminstrator.