Hi POD People I've created a bit of a storm by adding the new warning to Pod::Simple which is emitted if the source POD contains non-ASCII characters but does not include an =encoding POD command.
This has "broken CPAN" because a number of CPAN distributions (including DBI and Dancer) include a call to Test::Pod in their main test suite. Test::POD's role is to assert that parsing the POD produces no warnings or errors. While my patch adds a warning, in combination with Test::Pod it is effectively elevated to a fatal error which blocks a clean installation of affected distributions. The "correct" answer is for people who use Test::Pod to only run those tests on the author's system - i.e. pre release rather than pre install. (And ideally add the missing -=encoding too). Of course it might be a bit inconvenient for some maintainers to rush out a new release for that reason alone. I'm considering a patch to make Test::Pod treat the new "missing =encoding" warning differently to other warnings. The current behaviour is to fail the test if any warnings were generated. Instead we could patch it as per the following pseudo code: if no warnings pass test else if exactly one warning AND it's the new =encoding message spit out a warning via test diag output pass test else fail test This would mean that an end-user having trouble with failing tests at install time could work around it by upgrading Test::Pod. I asked David Wheeler whether this was a) sensible and b) worth doing. He confessed to not having much of an opinion on the matter and suggested I post here. Opinions? Regards Grant