I recently got well rid of the closed source ActiveState release of perl for the reassuringly open StrawberryPerl version. One of the things I prefer is the excellent CLI CPAN client to download/upgrade any modules you are interested in. In my opinion this is hugely superior to the GUI thing in the ActiveState distribution - not least because it gives access to every module on CPAN.

However, I have been running in to some issues when I try to upgrade the modules I have already installed. After starting the CPAN client, I type for instance:

and all seems to go well at first. Several modules are downloaded, compiled and replace their earlier versions. However, in my specific case errors start to appear when the automatic 'make test' is run on Compress::BZip2. The actual returns are too copious to reproduce here in entirety, but the following line is typical:

Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected end of string) in read at t/026-compfile.t line 32.

and the overall summary:

Files=31, Tests=569, 13 wallclock secs (0.20 usr + 0.06 sys = 0.27 CPU)
Result: FAIL
Failed 11/31 test programs. 13/569 subtests failed.

This is only one of several modules that fail in the same way.

Going from the data I guess there is a unicode/1252 translation issue and something to do with a module that was written for a UNIX environment not enjoying the Windows world. The specifics do not matter - I am more than willing for a few modules to prove incompatible in return for access to the whole CPAN archive. However, what IS annoying is that any single module that fails to compile stops the whole upgrade progress. Is there any way around this happening?