Ovid

I generally have no problem understanding what's in a CPAN distribution and why, but lately (for years, now), it seems that tools are building files that I don't know about. Is there a canonical place to find information about what absolutely, definitely needs to be in a CPAN distribution? I generally rely on my tools to do this stuff for me, but honestly, what's META.json, MYMETA.json, META.yml,MYMETEA.yaml? And then I wind up with files like MANIFEST.bak and MANIFEST.SKIP.bak and I honestly don't know the format of many of these files, why they're duplicated or where to look up this information. Which of these files should I commit to source control and which of these files should git ignore?

It's an embarrassment because honestly, I should know this stuff, but I don't. Surely there's a place where I can find all of this explained at once, perhaps in conjunction with a description of the files in my .cpan, .cpanm directories?