Pass on results of one processing stage to other

Look at:

_feedapi_inherit_locate_feedapi_item()

in feedapi_inherit.module

This function tries to pull information about a previous processing stage (node object produced by feedapi_item or similar) on the next stage. It does this by looking for the node being produced by feedapi_item in the database. As we don't have the means to pass on the result of one processing stage to the next one, we end up producing code like this.

What about handing down the results from stage to stage in an array like:

$results = array(
  'parser_simplepie' => .... ,
  'feedapi_item' => $node,
  ...,
  );

I am just not sure wether we should pass all information available about the feed through all processing stages or only the information about the current item being processed.