I use to include a VERSION section in the main module of the distributions uploaded to CPAN, but this comes at the risk of forgetting to update the number.

Over time, I adopted different strategies, ranging from doing it manually (guess what happened), to using Dist::Zilla all the way down to Pod::Weaver (which I really never liked), to switching to Milla and inserting a custom mangling script in an AfterBuild step (example dist.ini and mangling script if you're curious). This mostly works, but it's giving me issues in a corner case in Travis-CI which brought me to ask myself whether I still want it or not.

I somehow like the idea of including that section, so that anyone looking at the documentation can get an idea of what docs they are reading without resorting to hoop jumping (my favorite incantation being perldoc -m Module::Name and then looking for $VERSION). Spending additional effort on my custom mangling script is not something that attracts me too much. So I'd ask your advice about:

• does including a VERSION section really provide value in your opinion?
• is there any "evident" way to do automate that using Milla? Alas, it seems that miyagawa does not usually include that section (not in the ones I sampled, anyway), so there's no evident way for me to do this!

Thanks for any feedback!