Re (tilly) 2: require $package?

[tilly]

It is not necessary, however if you don't do it, Perl won't go as far out of its way to be DWIM.

That may require some explanation.

If you read the documentation for perldoc you will find that you are supposed to require a filename. For instance:

require "RPG/Item/Weapon/Spear.pm";

However as a special exemption, if you pass it a package name as a bare word, it will figure out what the filename should be for you.

require RPG::Item::Weapon::Spear; # Same as above

To get the auto package to filename conversion, the package must be named as a bareword.

Therefore your eval trick got the bareword in there. Or you could convert the package that you want into the filename before loading. Either works (the second is safer though if the package comes from user input). But if you pass it an actual string that is the name of a package, Perl has no way to know that that isn't the filename desired and so doesn't do the conversion.

Does that make sense?