…didn't you notice its not http://search.cpan.org/~tomc/ who releases this stuff?

Yes, naturally. Tom Christiansen wrote the utilities and brian d foy packaged them and uploaded the distribution to CPAN. As you said, there are Windows-thwarting Unixisms in both the code and the distribution. I'm missing your point here.

One obvious gripe, even after "successfully" installing Unicode::Tussle on Windows using cpan:  built-in paging of the standard output stream, which causes this problem on Windows…

C:\>unichars
List form of pipe open not implemented at C:\Perl\site\bin/unichars li
+ne 598.

C:\>sed -n 598p C:\Perl\site\bin/unichars
    open(STDOUT, "|- :utf8", $his_pager, @pager_args);

C:\>unichars --nopager 2>NUL | head
 ---- U+0000 NULL
 ---- U+0001 START OF HEADING
 ---- U+0002 START OF TEXT
 ---- U+0003 END OF TEXT
 ---- U+0004 END OF TRANSMISSION
 ---- U+0005 ENQUIRY
 ---- U+0006 ACKNOWLEDGE
 ---- U+0007 ALERT
 ---- U+0008 BACKSPACE
 ---- U+0009 CHARACTER TABULATION

C:\>perl -v | head -8

This is perl 5, version 16, subversion 1 (v5.16.1) built for MSWin32-x
+86-multi-thread
(with 1 registered patch, see perl -V for more detail)

Copyright 1987-2012, Larry Wall

Binary build 1601 [296175] provided by ActiveState http://www.ActiveSt
+ate.com
Built Aug 30 2012 20:08:55

C:\>
[download]

I'm missing your point here.

Tomc has account yet chose not to release it, so Ovid releases it.

When bugs reports come (say cpan testers), Ovid ignores them (hey, I just upload it), and Tomc doesn't get them (hey, I didn't upload it), and the unixisms remain.

When the author doesn't release his own work, when author doesn't at least have have "maintainer" status on cpan, expect the package to not work, well :)