You are not supposed to put symlinks in a CPAN distribution because symlinks are not portable. Even some (very old and probably now obsolete) Unix systems did not support symlinks and modern Windows still lacks the feature.

To this day, the GNU coding standards still have the following:

Don’t include any symbolic links in the distribution itself. If the tar file contains symbolic links, then people cannot even unpack it on systems that don’t support symbolic links. Also, don’t use multiple names for one file in different directories, because certain file systems cannot handle this and that prevents unpacking the distribution. —— https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html, section 7.3 "Making Releases"

I see no reason not to follow that advice for CPAN as well.

In reply to Re: unable to make manifest with symlinks by jcb
in thread unable to make manifest with symlinks by mvsjes2

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