One thing most people overlook, that I find extremely useful is to build EVERY application or library as if you were going to release it to CPAN. This has several advantages and takes almost no extra time once you get used to it. The main advantages are:

• You can leverage the existing install infrastructure to automatically handle dependicies for you.
• In your dist you can hold all of our associated documentation, database schemas, cron scripts, etc. all in one tar.gz.
• As one of my co-workers just started us using, you can use CPAN::Mini to help install applications and/or libraries on multiple servers easily.
• It makes each app consistent. You know what you'll find in bin/, in docs/, in sql/, in lib/... no surprises and it makes the programmer who has to maintain your code a year from now ( which is btw most likely you! ) have a much easier job.

Take a typical web app, you've got your Perl code, your database schema, your configuration information, and probably at least a few cron scripts.

By using something like module-starter and Module::Build you can automatically install your templates in say /usr/share/web-templates, your cron scripts into /opt/app/cron/, and drop your configuration into /etc/httpd/conf.d with a simple make install

If you aren't familiar with either Module::Build or ExtUtils::MakeMaker then there is a bit of a learning curve, but once you learn how to use these modules effectively, doing this adds a very trivial amount of time to each app and/or library. Trust me that once you start using it, you'll never want to work in an environment that doesn't.

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