Because Schwern (who added all those misfeatures) threw his hands up in despair and declared it unfixable. Hence, the fixed version was released under a new name, parent.pm.

And it's not a problem when things work, but once things fail, they fail ways that are hard to debug because whether a subclass gets loaded depends on program flow in a nonobvious way.

• p5p thread

I guess I just know how to use base then. *shrug* You guys are really doing a great job of tearing Perl up, module by module.

That's a petty and trivial reason to not use base, no?

Considering there's no reason to use base in the first place...

Why has there not been a "bug" fix?

They did fix it with the creation of parent. Fixing it in place would break the following intended use of base:

{
   package Base;
   ...   
}

{
   package Subclass;
   use base 'Base';
   ...
}
[download]

So the fix is to go back to all of our code and replace base with parent and retest and try to explain to our clients why they have to pay for it. That's just great. No, really. Thanks a lot.

I guess the answer is use Moose! I'm never using base again. Nor parent.

Heh, you're fretting over converting to parent, but changing to Mouse is ok.

Who said anything about changing any old code? And if you had to, how is that a "fixing base" vs "creating parent" thing? You'd have to change the code either way.