I forgot to say (my bad) that lately I like to keep my POD in a separate .pod file, so that modules come to be tighter when I do a fatpack-like operation (without the need to do the stripping on the fly, which is mangling the file's contents, which always makes me feel nervous. This is another story though).

The testing alternative proposed by tinita in Re: Don't Repeat Your version number has the advantage of forcing me to update the version number in the POD, which is something that really happens only at release time so it's no big deal actually. On the other hand, I'm really lazy and I'm using automatic update in the Perl sources already (so much for my nervousness), so a simple automation on the POD is already below the threshold of what I'm implicitly inclined to accept.

All in all, I'm getting from the feedbacks to this thread that a few people find value in keeping VERSION in POD too, which is good to know by itself.