Current DBI docs claim use of clone() without an argument is deprecated (because there's some question of which attributes should be copied over, which may change, or something). No idea how likely they'll go through with it.

Also, if the original connection specs are available then there's no reason not to just do a fresh connect() in the child (since that's what clone does anyway), i.e., you're not actually saving anything by inheriting it from the parent.