That hasn't been my experience with CPAN, though cpantesters and cpanratings can serve as a guide to what works and what doesn't. This type of service does not exist for rubygems/pypi to my knowledge.

While Perl's unicode support is unparalleled, there are some things to be aware of:

http://www.perl.com/pub/2012/04/perlunicook-standard-preambl...