From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2005-09-30T08:04:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Require Namepaces and RubyGems' effect on LoadPath problem

On 9/29/05, TRANS <transfire@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/26/05, mathew <meta@pobox.com> wrote:
>> XML has namespaces so that there can be multiple elements with the
>> same base name. Ruby 'require' already supports that--you can have
>> require 'foo/set.rb' and require 'bar/set.rb', the same way you can
>> have <foo:set> and <bar:set>.
> Sort of. XML namespaces are references. So foo: and bar: could
> actually be referencing the same space, in which case they'd be the
> same 'set'. That's kind of what Require Namespaces does: It allows you
> to require a 'name' that will be searched for in alternate/multiple
> directories.

That doesn't change that the primary purpose of namespaces in XML is to
solve a real problem ... that doesn't exist in Ruby. Frankly, what
you've written is code in search of both a problem and a solution. It's
neat, but ultimately useless for anything meaningful or helpful.

>> I still don't understand how this namespace proposal improves things,
>> other than to reduce typing. Can you give an example?
> I use it to organize a very large library. I've organized the lib
> according to principles that make sense for development --in this case
> it's a collection of general purpose libs so I've put classes in one
> directory, modules in another, etc. But I don't want the end user to
> have to "path down" so far, so the namespace allow all the folders to
> be grouped together. So intead of:

Then it may make more sense for you to reorganise your lib for
development. Or maybe -- just maybe -- it's time to split nano and mega
into different release collections.

If that's not desirable, then reorganise the files dynamically during
packaging. The Rakefile that I use to package PDF::Writer does *exactly*
that with the .tar.gz files. I'd like to be able to get into that level
of rewriting the internals of .gems, but I haven't yet asked for it.

> Morover, it makes it easy to add aliases. For instance this could work too:
>
>   mylibs/foo.rb
>   mylibs/bar.rb
>
> As things stand there is no way to do this. One could use symlinks but
> you'd have to maintain them and they are not cross-platform.

Again, code in search of a reason and use. Why would you *want* to do
this? It ends up *defeating* Ruby's load-protection mechanisms (e.g., if
mylib/foo and mylibs/foo are the same thing, they *will* be loaded twice
because they appear to be unique files).

-austin
--
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca