Well, I dont know about this. I mean, the problem is this, we have a FTPSession class as base class for FTPSession::Win32 and FTPSession::Unix and of course the means of FTP'ing is done in Win32::Internet in the former and Net::FTP for the latter. We have another package, Util, in which we build up a string version of the log message we output to STDOUT. To save from the client having to tell us what the log msg says on STDOUT, we want to upload STDOUT to ourselves when the script is about to exit. Thus, we need FTP session information from the FTP module hierarchy and we need log information from the util package. If Perl had a rigorously defined protocol for the sequence in which objects were destroyed (I imagine Eiffel, Smalltalk and other such languages probably do...), then I could simply code my destructor with this knowledge.