From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2007-04-20T17:55:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Project vs. Package

On 19.04.2007 21:31, Trans wrote:
> Actually, for me it's much more difficult because I mostly write libs
> and not apps. It's not as simple as a single .rb file to require. I
> have a large collection of them, each needs to be requirable. This
> problem arises elsewhere too, for instance, using CodeForPeople's
> traits lib. It's isn't
> 
>   require 'codeforpeople/traits'
> 
> it's
> 
>   require 'traits'
> 
> Effectively CodeForPeople has taken a monopoly on the term 'traits'.
> That might not seem a big deal (and note I'm not worried about the
> particular case, it's just an example), but multiple that by 70 and
> you'd be sitting in my shoes (yes I have 70+ small libs to
> distribute). Multiple that by another factor of 100 or more as Ruby
> becomes an increasingly popular language, and we really have the
> potential for name clash issues.

Whatever you do (call it prefixes, namespaces or whatnot) there will 
always be a point of potential collision.  Java has taken the route to 
use domain names as package discriminators which is probably a good 
idea.  But you cannot enforce that and it seems that in Java land people 
tend to omit the leading "com" which surely increases the potential for 
collisions; but this does not seem to be an issue in practice.  There is 
simply no completely safe solution other than having a global 
institution that hands out package prefixes / directory names.

Kind regards

	robert