Bug #78876 for CPAN:

If PERL5OPT is set to a user value (like -CSA), CPAN corrupts the downloadable author database. cpan[1]> install Device::SpaceNavigator Fetching with LWP: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz Fetching with LWP: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz Fetching with LWP: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/03modlist.data.gz Database was generated on Wed, 08 Aug 2012 02:14:30 GMT Updating database file ... Cannot eval /Share/CPAN/sources/modules/03modlist.data.gz: Unrecognized character \x03; marked by <-- HERE after $__ExPr__;<-- HERE near column 14 at (eval 60) line 1, <TYPE> line 39. Catching error: "system /usr/bin/perl -MCPAN::SQLite::META=setup,update -e update failed: 65280 at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.14.2/CPAN/SQLite/META.pm line 332.\cJ" at /usr/lib/perl5/5.14.2/CPAN.pm line 392. CPAN::shell() called at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.14.2/App/Cpan.pm line 338 App::Cpan::_process_options('App::Cpan') called at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.14.2/App/Cpan.pm line 421 App::Cpan::run('App::Cpan') called at /usr/bin/cpan line 13 Database was generated on Wed, 08 Aug 2012 02:14:30 GMT Updating database file ... Cannot eval /Share/CPAN/sources/modules/03modlist.data.gz: Unrecognized character \x03; marked by <-- HERE after $__ExPr__;<-- HERE near column 14 at (eval 60) line 1, <TYPE> line 39. Scanning cache /home/cache/CPAN-build/build for sizes ............................................................................DONE Lockfile removed. system /usr/bin/perl -MCPAN::SQLite::META=setup,update -e update failed: 65280 at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.14.2/CPAN/SQLite/META.pm line 332. ------------------- To work around the bug, the user must know that this is the cause (!), unset it and manually delete the cache files, since CPAN doesn't seem to try to download them again after it has corrupted them. (maybe it would if the file were a day old.. (cache expir))... If CPAN needs to have or not have certain values in PERL5OPT, it should likely set them. It would appear that maybe the database files are not UTF-8 encoded? Which would indicate Perl is not very welcoming to users w/names not in ASCII/Latin1?