At the QA Hackathon this year, a number of us had several discussions related to the overall stability of CPAN, how to think about it, and what it means for CPAN authors.
One output of this was the "CPAN River" model for discussing the other CPAN distributions your distribution uses, and those that use yours.
This talk will introduce the model and how your development and release processes might change as your distribution "moves up river".