I've posted the first of these to RT, the second I'll try and get around to creating a patch for because I can fix it...
First bug: I have a particular file that results from decoding a particular japanese spam that Encode simply hangs on when used via perlio (it works fine when used via from_to, but I *need* perlio for my app so that I can fling filehandles around). I have worked around this bug by checking I can read the first line in an "alarm" section before returning the perlio translated filehandle back to the caller. A bit hacky but it works.
Second bug: While trying to make this really easy for Dan Kogai to reproduce I was trying to get piconv (the perl iconv command line tool replacement) to work in perlio mode. There's a typo in piconv that prevents you using any other scheme than from_to. Here's the required diff line:
-my $scheme = exists $Scheme{$Opt{Scheme}} ? $Opt{Scheme} : 'from_to';
+my $scheme = exists $Scheme{$Opt{scheme}} ? $Opt{scheme} : 'from_to';
Simple case problem in hash access - how many of us have been bitten by that little one in the past eh?