in reply to use deprecated;

Here's one approach
package deprecated; use Carp qw/ carp croak /; use vars '%subs'; sub import { my($good_self, @subs) = @_; my $pkg = caller; *{"$pkg\::AUTOLOAD"} = sub { croak "unknown subroutine '$AUTOLOAD'" unless exists $deprecated::subs{$AUTOLOAD}; carp "deprecated subroutine '$AUTOLOAD'"; *$AUTOLOAD = $deprecated::subs{$AUTOLOAD}; goto &$AUTOLOAD; } unless defined &{"$pkg\::AUTOLOAD"}; for(@subs) { $subs{"$pkg\::$_"} = \&{"$pkg\::$_"}; *{"$pkg\::$_"} = *{"dummy_$pkg\_$_"}; } } q[ the end is nigh ... ];
And some example usage
{ package foo; sub func1 { print "old\n" } sub func2 { print "older\n" } sub func3 { print "new\n" } use deprecated qw/ func1 func2 /; } print "calling: func1\n"; foo->func1; print "calling: func2\n"; foo->func2; print "calling: func3\n"; foo->func3; print "calling: func1 again ...\n"; foo->func1; __output__ calling: func1 deprecated subroutine 'foo::func1' at deprecated_test.pl line 13 old calling: func2 deprecated subroutine 'foo::func2' at deprecated_test.pl line 15 older calling: func3 new calling: func1 again ... old
Note that use deprecated goes after the subroutine declarations, so they're populated when it goes to insert the dummy routines.

Briefly, what it does is create an AUTOLOAD method that will carp and then replace the dummy subroutine with the actual subroutine.

HTH

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broquaint