Unless the
PAUSE docs are out of date,
it uses it:
Please make sure all your *.pm files contain a $VERSION variable that conforms to the CPAN rules, i.e. the complete computation of $VERSION must take place on the one first line within the module that assigns to it. You can test if this is the case by running
perl -MExtUtils::MakeMaker -le 'print MM->parse_version(shift)' 'fil
+e'
on the filenames in question. The CPAN indexer will run this code within a Safe compartement, so maybe even if the above command succeeds, PAUSE may fail if you're doing file IO or other potentially dangerous things within that line.