G'day puterboy,

The encoding directive is described in "perlpod: Command Paragraph".

That directive appears in the DateTime::Locale::pa_Guru_IN source code at the very start of the POD:

=pod

=encoding utf8
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I don't know when that directive was introduced. It's documented in Perl v5.8.8 perlpod; I couldn't find it documented in my copy of "Programming Perl, 3rd Edition" which covers Perl v5.6.

It's some years since I used Cygwin, but I recall it came with a very old version of Perl. Use perl -v to determine the version you're using; you may need to update; the latest stable production version is 5.18.2.

I recalled you've had other installation problems recently. I went back to check and noticed you've just added Re: Difficult compiling Package::Stash::XS which includes "/usr/lib/perl5/5.14/x86_64-cygwin-threads/...". That tends to rule out an old Perl version problem (assuming you're using v5.14 in the curent scenario).

I tried installing DateTime::Locale::pa_Guru_IN myself via cpan and it worked fine without any errors or warnings (I have Perl v5.18.1):

$ cpan

cpan[1]> install DateTime::Locale::pa_Guru_IN 
...
Creating new 'Build' script for 'DateTime-Locale' version '0.45'
...
Installing /Users/ken/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.18.1t/lib/site_perl/
+5.18.1/DateTime/Locale.pm
...
Installing /Users/ken/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.18.1t/lib/site_perl/
+5.18.1/DateTime/Locale/pa_Guru_IN.pm
...
  DROLSKY/DateTime-Locale-0.45.tar.gz
  ./Build install  -- OK
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I found a bug report that may have a bearing on your problem: Bug #85628 for DateTime-Locale: [PATCH] POD fix.

I also tried to install just DateTime. This worked fine also:

cpan[3]> install DateTime
...
  DROLSKY/DateTime-1.06.tar.gz
  ./Build install  -- OK
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And, just to be on the safe side, in case that new version had caused some issue:

cpan[4]> install DateTime::Locale::pa_Guru_IN
DateTime::Locale::pa_Guru_IN is up to date (undef).
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You haven't said how you're actually "using cpan to install DateTime". Perhaps try with the commands I've shown or, if you've been specifying a distribution, check the version numbers.

Regarding the last part of your question, L<...> is a POD formatting code for hyperlinks (described in perlpod: Formatting Codes). The two http://* links do resolve correctly via a browser (you can try them directly yourself). Until you can install DateTime, not being able to link to/from its documentation is moot.

All good points.

My version of Cygwin uses 5.14 -- which is not the latest but hardly ancient and way newer than 5.8.8

I am indeed using 'cpan' (under cygwin) to do the install. DateTime installed without any issues. The only problem was with DateTime:TimeZone. Both DateTime and DateTime::TimeZone *seem* to be working OK but I am not really stressing DateTime::TimeZone in that I am only really using it to read & set the TimeZone by name.

The reason I asked this question is that DateTime::TimeZone is a pretty standard module so I was surprised that googling didn't surface this issue (then again perhaps it's not included as a Cygwin package for a reason :)

Thanks again for your very detailed and helpful comments. For now, in the absence of any other insight and given the fact that it seems to work well enough in my own simple cases, I will just assume it "works" good enough.

Thanks!

What Perl version? The =encoding feature hasn't been a part of the POD spec forever. Check to ensure your version of Perl is sufficiently current to meet the needs of version of the module you require.

5.14 which per my googling is recent enough to include 'encoding'. Thanks

I frequently encounter this same problem when I run my tests. From what I've read, the problem harks back to older versions of Pod::Man. It didn't require Pod::Simple, and it didn't require Encode. The =encoding UTF-8 didn't come around until grantm put it into Pod::Simple---and that was around 2012; whereas perl v5.14.0 came out in May of 2011. Reinstall Pod::Man, Pod::Simple, and Encode. Then reinstall DateTime::Locale.