Yes, the redefinition route might be the final result. Plus re-exporting gmtime() and localtime().

As for the why of my desire for an isa relationship...I was building an "enhanced" timepiece that has some extended functionality...but I still wanted the behavior of Time::Piece, particularly the existing object methods, overloaded math operator functionality, stringification, etc.

It was beginning to look like I was going to have to override everything in order to do that, which sort of defeats the purpose of subclassing. So I appealed to my fellow Brethren for better ideas.

I think you have the right idea, though...given isa, I'm probably going to have to kiss all and redefine _mktime()

Thanks for the sounding board,
Matt