How do I subclass DB?

larryk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Maybe I'm just having an attack of premature senile dementia, but looking at the DB module documentation it looks like subclassing should be easy - something along the lines of:

package Devel::larryk;
use base qw(DB);
use strict;

Devel::larryk->new()->register(); # create instance and register

sub new { bless {} }

sub init {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->ready();
    print "larryk initialised\n";
}

1;
[download]

This should then be invokable from the command line, as:

perl -d:larryk foo.pl
[download]

...but it doesn't work. Why?

Because as soon as I use the DB module (in order to subclass it) it immediately calls ->init() on all registered clients. But of course I haven't registered as a client yet because I only just used it. So I seem to have a chicken and egg situation.

How can this work?

   larryk                                          
perl -le "s,,reverse killer,e,y,rifle,lycra,,print"

Comment on How do I subclass DB? Select or Download Code

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Re: How do I subclass DB? by thcsoft (Monk) on May 10, 2005 at 11:32 UTC
because you should either type: `perl -MDevel::larryk -e' ...'` [download] or `perl -e 'use Devel::larryk; ...'` [download] :) language is a virus from outer space.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: How do I subclass DB? by Anonymous Monk on May 10, 2005 at 11:45 UTC
perldoc perlrun -d:foo=bar,baz runs the program under the control of a debugging, profiling, or tracing module installed as Devel::foo. E.g., -d:DProf executes the program using the Devel::DProf profiler. As with the -M flag, options may be passed to the Devel::foo package where they will be received and interpreted by the Devel::foo::import routine. The comma-separated list of options must follow a "=" character. See perldebug.	[reply]
Re^2: How do I subclass DB? by larryk (Friar) on May 10, 2005 at 13:03 UTC
Thanks, but that's not actually the problem. The Devel:: is assumed with the -d switch. My problem is that the DB module does something as soon as it is included to organise registered debugging "clients". Unfortunately, this does not give me any time to actually register, as I have to include the code before I can subclass it (or at any rate, the register function must be defined so I can call it _to_ register). I don't really fancy what seems to be the answer which is to doubly declare the DB package so I can step through the `use` of DB.pm itself in order to call register() before it inits the registered clients ugh. Thanks for your suggestion, though. larryk perl -le "s,,reverse killer,e,y,rifle,lycra,,print"	[reply] [d/l]