I did something like this at the beginning. I set up patches for MIME::Lite and then included the patches in the distribution for my code. When makefile.pl ran it would check the version of MIME::Lite and if it was unpatched (turns out that MIME::Lites version string doesnt compare properly) it would apply the patch first. The problem is that I work on Win32 so having patch handy wasnt guarenteed, yada yada. In the end it was much simpler just to modify the released version and include it directly. Although overriding existing subs with new code never occured to me I admit.

Incidentally are you aware of any CPAN policy for unmaintained modules? Is there a "takeover" mechanism available or not? Have the senior Perl people ever discussed this?

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demerphq