Seen perl-reversion which comes with the Perl::Version module? It makes this a breeze. (In fact, DZ uses Perl::Version to do its version-setting dirty work, so if you've got DZ on your system, you've already got perl-reversion installed!)

Ah, another good tip! I'll see if I can use this in my CPAN release script as a stopgap measure until I get around to investigating DZ more thoroughly. Thanx again!