I ran into base.pm's flakiness just yesterday after sprinkling in the following debug line:

warn "RDBO version: $Rose::DB::Object::VERSION;"
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Because that caused base.pm's dubious heuristic to indicate that there was no need to require Rose::DB::Object I saw an error message along the lines of...

The workaround:

END {
    no strict;
    warn "RDBO version: " . ${ 'Rose::DB::' . 'Object::VERSION' };
}
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The $Foo::VERSION scalar doesn't have to be assigned to; its mere presence in the code as a package global gives it a stash entry and an undefined value. That's apparently enough for base.pm.

base.pm is a good idea, but the implementation is problematic.