I made a developer release of XML::Atom 0.19_03 on CPAN. The code is availabe on http://pause.perl.org/incoming/XML-Atom-0.19_03.tar.gz
This release reflects btrott's internal big refactoring and better Atom 1.0 content@type support, Atom 1.0 default feed creation (by setting $XML::Atom::DefaultVersion = "1.0") and better Unicode handling (by setting $XML::Atom::ForceUnicode = 1).
It should be all backward compatible but testing and feedbacks are welcome.