Thanks for the word of warning about the DBI stuff, I'll be sure to spend some extra time testing that when this actually gets integrated :)

The reason for doing this is because we have a product which supports adding entities that are essentially sandboxed codebases. The catch here is that these entities can be different versions of the product. (I am not a fan of this, but it's water under the bridge at this point).

Each codebase has at least one well-known method across all versions, and there are methods in the base product that will iterate over all entities and call this method on each one (to initialize it).

The snags happen when the codebases are different versions, not just from eachother but also from the main product (which by happenstance also has a definition of this method).

So, in effect, this solution is necessary to compensate for the requirement that these entities support different versions running on the same machine.