It's not a common problem that I've seen, and I install a huge amount of stuff immediately from the CPAN (to the point where it even annoys some of the developers when I report bugs within minutes of CPAN submission).

The timestamps inside a tarball are timezone neutral, so it can't be about "locale". However, I have seen very occasionally a tarball created with a mis-set clock so that files are a day or so into the future. First, I report the mistake immediately, but the workaround is simple: set all modtimes to "right now":

tar xvfz Bad-Distro-1.4.tar.gz
find Bad-Distro-1.4 -type f -print | xargs -t touch
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