One of the main issues that drove us to run private instances was the simple goal of allowing each developer to continue working even if an individual developer introduced a compile error into their local codebase. If a module used by the majority of the site was being worked on, and a syntax, compile, or run-time error (like calling a typo'd method name) was introduced, it basicly disabled the other developers.

We re-organized the source code into a hierarchical directory structure (like you would see in lib/perl5/*) based on package names. We then just added the source directory to the @INC used by mod_perl. Each developer used their own working copy of the CVS archive, something like $HOME/projects/webSite/lib. The document root for the web site, as well as the Perl lib path were both under the same project in CVS.

This also simplified the release process for us, which basicly ended up being a cvs update on the QA, and then ultimately production servers.

Kyle