Do you need for it to be bundled in ./inc?

Not in the least. :-)

Or would it be adequate to assure that when a user types cpanm Data::Random (or his favorite variation on that command), he gets YAML::Tiny pulled in prior to Makefile.PL executing? Usually that's fine. ...

Yes, I think that should work. I'll give it a shot and see if that fixes the problem for my bug reporters. Good tip; thanx.

If you really do need to bundle some dependency along with your distribution, have a look at the docs for the Module::Install extension/plugin: Module::Install::Bundle.

Actually, I messed around with that one already. It doesn't do what I wanted it to do ... it bundles the distribution into my distro, which then it will (theoretically, although I also found somewhere in the POD that said it didn't work) install when/after it installs mine. But, even if it did work, it wouldn't work, if you follow me. Having YAML::Tiny all bundled up doesn't do any good if the installation needs to use it.

On mst's advice, I also tried include('YAML::Tiny') in the Makefile.PL, but I got: Unknown function is found at Makefile.PL line 19. But it actually did put YAML::Tiny in inc/, so it sort of worked ... you know, with the minor disadvantage of causing my make disttest to fail. :-/

But I think the configure_requires idea should work, so I'm going to try that..