From: Bryan Murphy <bryan@...>
Date: 2001-12-05T08:18:25+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:27491] Re: Package Naming

>
>
>I'm not sure what we should do, but I'm sure that RAA.succ should
>enforce it :-)
>
>I can't think of a great alternative to module hierarchies, though
>such hierarchies tend to have an element of arbitrariness to them.
>Not through slopiness -- just because things don't always fall neatly
>into categories or name paths.
>
>It may be, though, that this would not matter too much if there were
>ways to index and search things that were orthogonal to the actual
>names.  For example, if I'm looking for text processing modules, that
>could include XML-related modules.  I could then just live with it if
>what I found happened to be called XML::Something::Whatever instead of
>Text::Something::Whatever.
>
I always wondered why something has to be part of a particular 
namespace.   I wrote a web application (currently in the slow process of 
updating it) that lets you take your bookmarks and categorize them 
(without having to make multiple copies of each bookmark).  You can take 
a look at my links here:  http://links.terralab.com/view/bryan/

Now, I don't see why Modules and Namespaces have to behave exactly the 
way they do.  Why not something like this?

module MyXMLConfigModule
  module_alias Text::XML::MyXMLConfigModule
  module_alias XML::Text::MyXMLConfigModule
  module_alias Configuration::Tools::MyXMLConfigModule
end

require 'Text/XML/MyXMLConfigModule'
works the same as
require 'XML/Text/MyXMLConfigModule'

?  It would of course require some changes to Ruby, and some care would 
need to be taken on behalf of the module maintainers, but the module 
maintainers already do that anyway.  At least those modules that got 
into some sort of standard library could be guaranteed to be consistent. 
 You could also do something for your apps like uninstalling 
XML::Parsers::REXML, and replacing it with your own library that is 
interface compatible and aliases to XML::Parsers::REXML even though it 
isn't REXML.