I installed as much as I could of CPAN and BUNDLE::CPAN through force and
then restarted cpan, it noticed it was missing some setting variables in
the config.pm file and put them in, once that was done it appeared to get
out of this circular dependency loop when I tried to install it the next
time it worked.
oh and just so you know i'm working on a cluster that is STILL using 5.8.8
so my comment is relevant here despite the outdatedness of the bug.