Thanks for your response! Replies to this node suggest that h2xs is outdated. As I point out in my post, I tried Minilla, and had some issues with it.

I spent a few hours Friday night figuring out what was wrong, and determined that my MANIFEST file was incomplete. I also discovered that the POD Coverage tool fails to find POD in the named module under the lib directory -- once I'd added use lib './lib' to the test, it just worked. I've learned a lot.

I've also figured out that my man page for the module is deficient -- I include a command line tool with the module, but I don't mention it at all in the POD, so I have to fix that omission. I've written a script to automate building a release (of course) and I copy files from the module directory into the CPAN directory if they're absent, but I don't do a cp -u $src $dest as I should. (Tangent -- I wrote a REXX script to do that on OS/2 in the early 90's. It was super useful.)

The journey continues.