G'day Alex,

I use Module::Starter with Module::Starter::PBP as a plugin. I use that plugin mainly because I like the templates which I customise a lot (I also pull out the PBP specific parts, e.g. perlcritic.t).

I keep a number of config files for various purposes; e.g. OO mod, functional mod, $work mod, etc. Each of these points to a different directory with my customised templates. Here's the current one:

$ cat ~/.module-starter/config
author:  Ken Cotterill
email:   kcott@cpan.org
builder: ExtUtils::MakeMaker
plugins: Module::Starter::PBP
template_dir: /home/ken/.module-starter/P532

$ ls -al ~/.module-starter/P532
total 24
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 ken None    0 Jan  9  2021 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 ken None    0 Jan  6  2021 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 ken None   89 Jan  5  2021 Changes
-rw-r--r--  1 ken None  586 Jan  5  2021 Makefile.PL
-rw-r--r--  1 ken None   82 Jan  9  2021 MANIFEST.SKIP
-rw-r--r--  1 ken None 5205 Jan  5  2021 Module.pm
-rw-r--r--  1 ken None  313 Dec 19  2020 README
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 ken None    0 Jan  9  2021 t
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And, just to give you an idea of the templates, Module.pm has:

package <MODULE NAME>;
...
=head1 LICENCE AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <AUTHOR> C<< <<EMAIL>> >>. All rights reserved.
...
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Creating the module is a little easier with this plugin because you don't need to specify so many options (e.g. the --author="Andy Lester" --email=andy@petdance.com, or equivalent, are not required).

Creating the distribution uses the fairly standard incantation:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make dist
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That last command creates the distribution tarball.

I'd generally want to also run Author Tests so something like this first (your environment variable may have a different name):

$ export RELEASE_TESTING=1
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I've used this method dozens (if not hundreds) of times and not encountered problems: it seems robust and stable.