My advice is to not quickly dismiss dzil and similar distribution builder tools like ShipIt, etc.

Spoken like someone who's never tried to bend dzil et all to his will :)

The harder and more tedious part after that is building the distribution, updating the various standard files (README, MANIFEST, META.yml, etc), testing and releasing it. This needs to be done *many* times. dzil (or its equivalent) will help you automate these tasks.

Heard of ExtUtils::MakeMaker or Module::Build or Module::Install? ExtUtils::MakeMaker or Module::Build or Module::Install do the updating of MANIFEST and META, dzil not required.

Same goes for both testing and releasing

The 30 minutes that you "lost", will save you hours and hours later.

strawman for sure, I've yet to meet a programmer that cares how long it takes cpan/cpanp/cpanm to download/install dzil among the criteria for usefulness of dzil

Maybe dzil saves dzil authors time, it didn't save me any, for me it was just a hassle

Even if you think you will only release one distribution to CPAN, consider using a distribution builder tool anyway. Since releasing a distribution becomes so easy and quick with dzil, this will actually encourage you to release more CPAN modules. That's what happened to me. :)

:) Cannot find pauseid http://search.cpan.org/~sedusedan/