merlyn had a column on that. Maybe we need a meryln tag for perlmonks?

-derby

Update: Uggh. I missed the "I don't want to mirror" part of the OP. In my company we work this the other way around. We have several production environments and then we also have a test and development enviroment. When we build perl, we include our "company specific" INC path. The normal flow is to download CPAN modules to dev, test and production. Company specific modules are developed on dev. Then we push through those modules to test and push through to production via rdist. So it's a bit more complicated to set up but if you have more than one production machine - it's much easier to rdist from a test environment than it is to go to each production machine and do CPAN updates. And since our production machines are similar, we really only do a CPAN update on one and rdist those updates out to the rest (but we do need to do a CPAN update for each different architecutre - linux, solaris, etc).