I have not delved deeply into it, though it or some packaging utility sounds like it could be useful.

I'd certainly like to know if there is a pure Perl solution to installing a package of many files, managing the process and not depending on any unix programs at all.

Thinking about it some more, I looked at these:
ExtUtils::Install - install files from here to there
ExtUtils::Command - utilities to replace common UNIX commands in Makefiles etc.
ExtUtils::MakeMaker - create an extension Makefile
ExtUtils::Installed - Inventory management of installed modules
ExtUtils::Manifest - utilities to write and check a MANIFEST file
ExtUtils::Packlist - manage .packlist files

The last one seems to be use a .packlist file instead of a MANIFEST file, but easily lets you check every file in the .packlist exists. Suppose you could just to a file test if it is simple, but personally if there is an easy to use module (I think MakeMaker probably is it, anybody?) that would scan a bunch of directories on my local machine, skip files with certain extensions, pack it up into an archive, and reinstall it on a target machine while letting you do things like globally replacing ip numbers and pathnames in perl code, and hyperlinks in html files, it would be pretty useful. I'd rather not get hip deep but if anybody has experience with the above, maketool, etc. would also like to know your experience. It is a recurring problem and ultimately an interactive or simply configured platform-transparent utility would be super. If it compiled packages in a local folder too for me that would be swell.

..Oh, maybe CPAN.pm could do this too.. erm. Last time I worried about this, I went through CPAN and MakeMaker docs, and finally ended up mashing up something for the moment. Still a need.