Guides to authoring CPAN modules:

• official PODs in Perl:
  • perlmodinstall — (background reading) installing CPAN Modules
  • perlmodlib — constructing new Perl modules and finding existing ones
  • perlnewmod — preparing a new module for distribution
  • perlmodstyle — Perl module style guide
  • perlmod — (background reading) Perl modules (packages and symbol tables)
• pause.perl.org
  • CPAN/modules/04pause.html
  • "On The Naming of Modules"
• cpan.org FAQ, §VI. Contributing modules, patches, and bug reports
• cpants.cpanauthors.org — CPANTS, the testing service for CPAN distributions
• cpancover.com — code-coverage information for CPAN modules
• places for CPAN authors/contributors to discuss their modules:
  • nntp.perl.org/group/perl.module-authors
  • lists.perl.org/list/module-authors.html — it's not super active
  • prepan.org — it seems to be dead, not having any updates for 10 months
  • nntp.perl.org/group/perl.modules — really it's PAUSE internal minutiae
• slides by Alex Balhatchet (Jan 2011)

List of files that should be inside a release tarball:

• ExtUtils::MakeMaker's explanation
• perlmodstyle's explanation

Specific files found within a release tarball:

• Makefile.PL — may be auto-generated, and can contain a variety of things depending on what tool you used to generate it
• Build.PL — may be auto-generated, and is probably based on Module::Build
• META.yaml — most releases have replaced this with META.json by now
• META.json — see CPAN::Meta::Spec
• MANIFEST — see ExtUtils::Manifest §MANIFEST
• MANIFEST.SKIP — see ExtUtils::Manifest §MANIFEST.SKIP
• README — see perlmodstyle
• Changes — generally a free-form file, but see CPAN::Changes::Spec if you want an attempt to codify it
• t/*.t or similar — these should be processed by running perl Makefile.PL; ...; make test or perl Build.PL; ...; ./Build test or just prove -l — see ExtUtils::MakeMaker §make-test or Module::Build §test or prove
  • for background info, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Anything_Protocol and testanything.org
  • if META.json includes a section called 'rules', then it will be interpreted by TAP::Parser::Scheduler
• cpanfile — see Module::CPANfile and its associated FAQ