I think that's right that PAUSE doesn't care, and also, it's up to the user's system to handle the line endings appropriately. However, there may be some circumstances where unix-style line endings are expected in a distribution - for example, some time ago search.cpan.org had to patch some tools that generate the html docs if Windows-style line endings were present, and there was a recent bug in ExtUtils-Manifest also related to such line endings. It's probably best, if possible, to run make dist to create a CPAN distribution on a Unix machine.