I learned of "perl Makefile.PL; make perl", which is fine for statically linking just one module. But how to do more than one? Do "make perl" on Curses first, then somehow add in DBI and others? The Camel book doesn't really say.

I didn't know just "make perl" worked; the invocation I'm familiar with is "perl Makefile.PL LINKTYPE=static", and that's what I see in the ExtUtils::MakeMaker docs. Making a static module is supposed to include all previously statically built modules automatically. Have you tried it?

But this only gets you the perl XS libraries statically linked; if those refer to other libraries, that will probably still be dynamic.