Is this common practice? Any thoughts?

I used to update the $VERSION on all packages in a module every time I released it. This way they were all in sync and looked nice and neat on CPAN. However, recently I have decided to change that approach. I had two basic reasons why I decided this:

1. I found often when I was making a change which only affected one package in the module, it felt weird incrementing the version number in the others, since they didn't change.
2. When adding packages to a module, it didn't make sense to start that new package at a version number higher than 0.01.

And dragonchild has a good point, your version is more tied to the version your source control gives you, and the version everyone else cares about is the release version, both are pretty arbitrary with the exception that they are expected to always go up.

Excellent question, BTW.