Despite Narveson's blessing, I, too, am curious about why you should get, not just a terse warning, but no warning at all under warnings—since a quick perusal of the diagnostics documentation suggests to me that it's meant only to amplify, not to add to, warnings's protestations. Unfortunately, I only have AutoLoader v.5.63—the one that comes with Perl 5.10.0—which doesn't have a require on line 92; and Perl 5.8.8's v.5.60 doesn't seem to be available on CPAN.

I searched the v.5.63 code for requires, and it does only two kinds of requires—one from a filename provided by find_filename, which seems explicitly to prevent itself from returning undef; and one require $path, which is executed only if (defined($path)). Could you post what's happening on line 92 of your AutoLoader.pm?