I recently released revision 2 of the @Starter plugin bundle for Dist::Zilla. This revision brings small improvements to the default behavior, as well as the option to set a different installer plugin. In order to use the new revision, you must set the option "revision = 2" when using the bundle.

Revision 2 uses [Pod2Readme] instead of [ReadmeAnyFromPod] to generate the text README file. [ReadmeAnyFromPod] is a great and flexible plugin, but [Pod2Readme] is much simpler for the specific purpose of generating a text README. For any additional README files in other formats, I still recommend using [ReadmeAnyFromPod].

This revision also sets the option "inherit_version" in [MetaProvides::Package] to 0 by default. This makes no difference if your distribution contains uniform module versions, or for modules which have no version (they are still marked as having the distribution version unless you set "inherit_missing" to 0 as well), but if you have modules with different versions hardcoded, this will reflect that in the "provides" metadata.

The new "installer" option allows you to swap out the default [MakeMaker] installer plugin. The primary reason to do this is to use [MakeMaker::Awesome] when you need to customize portions of the generated "Makefile.PL". There is also the option to use [ModuleBuildTiny] or [ModuleBuildTiny::Fallback] if your distribution is simple enough to use Module::Build::Tiny as your installer.

I recommend upgrading to Revision 2 if you are currently using @Starter or @Basic. Check out the documentation for details, and come visit #distzilla on irc.perl.org if you have any questions or issues.

Since the original publication of this post, @Starter has reached revision 5 and the @Starter::Git variant bundle has been added for additional convenience. I will be republishing my other posts on @Starter in the coming week.