Dh-dist-zilla provides a debhelper sequence addon named 'dist_zilla', i.e. you can use it in your project's debian/rules as "dh $@ --with dist-zilla".

The intention is to be able to build Debian Perl packages directly from a Dist::Zilla based Perl distributions without generating the CPAN distribution tar-ball manually first. It is analogous to using autoreconf to generate the configure script.

The orig.tar.gz/.xz file must only contain the dist.ini and source files but not the generated files like META.yml, README, etc. If you use dh-dist-zilla, you can use "debian/rules get-orig-source" to generate a conforming upstream tar ball if none is available yet.