I may have mentioned the idea of maybe possibly eventually CPANizing
Encode to Dan, so some part of the blame maybe mine... CPANizing
frankly doesn't make much sense before we have at the very least
5.7.3, but probably not before we have 5.8.0. The Unicode support
in pre-5.7.2 simply isn't worth the backporting pain yet (maybe
eventually someone may get 5.6.X to work enough, but I wouldn't
hold my breath).
The situation is somewhat different in CJK regions, at least in
Japan. There are still thousands, if not millions, of servers running
perl 5.00503 or below. FreeBSD, for one, still uses 5.00503 for its
STABLE branch. Modules like this is in high demand.
One more time: pre-5.7.2 Perls have either no or very limited/broken
Unicode support. Trying to backport Encode to old Perls may be very
painful. No, I haven't *tried*. Why? I have this thing called 5.8.0
to think first.
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen