When I last looked at this I thought that the best solution would be to remove the tied mechanism altogether - there's not much functionality added; besides we should not be encouraging people to access the object hashes directly - it's not very 00. But I haven't found the time to look at exactly how much functionality would be lost, and how hard it would be to add that functionality back using a more traditional approach (if indeed it is possible at all).
If it turns out that the source of the various crashes is the tied mechanism, and it can't be fixed across all perl versions (which could be the case), then we should remove it. I agree, providing the hash is questionable.
If we remove it, we will break code. One way to limit the 'pain' could be to provide a method that returns the hash, which can then be accessed (this would also be quicker than using tie). Other than adding items to the hash, I can't think of a reason why you would need to use hash access (ok, to return items from the hash - but these should be methods if they don't exits).
Cheers, jez.
