By generic POD I just meant normal =head1 plus either items or a comma-separated list of dependencies. It wasn't really a clearly thought-out question, but it seemed you had more going on with the code that generated the INSTALLED MODULES than merely POD parsing. I guess I'm secretly desiring some tool, other than perl -c, that will recursively trace dependencies and present them in an outline format.

You are right that lots of modules do indeed put the dependencies in README/Makefile.PL (as well as perhaps POD). A dependency-sniffer would no doubt get tripped up on optional dynamic dependencies as well. :(

Matt