At the Perl QA hackathon, Andreas Koenig, the maintainer of PAUSE, demonstrated a way to decrease the lag between new distribution uploads to PAUSE and syndication to CPAN mirrors. (See File::Rsync::Mirror::Recent on CPAN for details). Running minicpan against a one of the new, fast updating mirrors results a very fresh minicpan, but, until now, only for regular releases, not for alpha development releases.
Last year, I wrote CPAN::Mini::Devel to include development releases in a minicpan, but it depends on an obscure, large, infrequently updated index. ((indices/find-ls.gz)) Now, with smaller, fast-updating index files available for rsync, I released CPAN::Mini::Devel::Recent to take advantage of them for minicpan as well.
This is all still experimental, but if you do Perl programming and want bleeding-edge development releases within minutes of their upload to PAUSE, then find a fast mirror, try out CPAN::Mini::Devel::Recent and let me know how it works for you. After installation, you can configure it to be used automatically by adding “class: CPAN::Mini::Devel::Recent” to your .minicpanrc file.