First of all, now I'm really sure that I'm not the only one who has need of including non standard CPAN modules in the application distribution as I presented in my meditation. Further, my situation was, even if the target host did have one or more of the modules, I inclined that the application used the ones in its private lib dir.

After struggling with docs from ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Module::Build, I managed to install the modules with the following command:

perl Makefile.PL INSTALLDIRS=perl PREFIX=/path/to/appl/lib LIB=/path/t
+o/appl/lib
make
make install
[download]

Well, I think that covers the first three ways you are informed about. While the other two gave me permission error (as a normal user), only PREFIX installed smoothly. However, it layout its stuffs (lib, share, man, bin) under /path/to/appl/lib.

I somehow insisted on using so-called "standard mechanism" but failed to prevent the extra stuff from spring. One thing I noticed was I also got i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi directory for, I thought, XS modules. I don't think I would get this directory with your cp -pr approach, but I believe that directory is just a fancy place for whatever it is.

Fortunately, I didn't get any problem regarding PREFIX. It just worked.