Ok. I've been looking (perldoc/google/super search) for the right way to do this - right in the sense that I don't have to disable warnings to prevent the subroutine redefined messages.

I've reduced the problem to a very mininal test case:

package X;

sub x { 1 }

package X::Y;
use base 'X';

1;
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This produces the following warning:

$ perl -cw X.pm
Subroutine x redefined at /data/web/lib/X.pm line 3.
X.pm syntax OK
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Now, I (think I) understand why it's giving this error - because it's trying to use the base package when it hasn't actually finished loading the file the base package is in. Splitting the X::Y package into it's own file eliminates the problem.

The full code is a pair of Class::DBI classes for a master/detail pair of tables, and I'd prefer to keep them together in one file. Is there a "right" way to do that, and prevent the sub redefined warnings? If not, I can live with having 2 files (or N files later) rather than 1.

Update: seems I missed the essential perldoc relevant to the problem (base). Simply defining a $VERSION for my base class prevents the sub-classes from doing 'require "X"' unnecessarily.

This works as intended:

package X;
$VERSION = 0.01;
sub x { 1 }

package X::Y;
use base 'X';

1;
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