From: Daniel Berger <djberge@...>
Date: 2002-10-30T04:58:56+09:00
Subject: Re: good link to read as we contemplate RAA, RAA.succ, et al

dblack@candle.superlink.net wrote:

> Hi --
>
> On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Pat Eyler wrote:
>
> > http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/2225
>
> Interesting.  Simon (hi Simon!) is probably right that "Definitive
> [library module] names discourage wheel reinvention."  The problem,
> though, is that such an approach means that whoever writes the *first*
> module called "XML::Parser" or "Text::Soundex" (or whatever) ends up
> having written the definitive one, whether it's any good or not.
>
> (I guess one could then write and contribute "XML::Parser::Good", but
> somehow that doesn't entirely address the difficulty :-)
>
> David

David,

I think you'll find that people are rather good at policing themselves in
this regard.  It rarely happens that a definitive name gets used by some
newbie who doesn't put out quality code.  Even if that situation *does*
occur, it can be resolved in a few different ways:

1) A more experienced author requests the name from the original author
(or offers *lots* of, uh, "patches")
2) A similar name is used, or the name is changed and/or slightly to get
the point across- e.g. Net::SSH (worthless) and Net::SSH::Perl (awesome)
3) The author has an "accident" and someone else takes over the namespace
- JUST KIDDING!

Sometimes it's hard to come up with a good name.  I used "Sys/ProcTable"
because it was based on Dan Urist's Proc::ProcessTable module.  I wanted
a similar name for those coming from Perl.  I also didn't want to use
"PS", because that can be confused with PostScript.  Maybe I should have
called it ProcessTable, but my carpal tunnel was kicking in when I
decided on the name.

My main gripe, personally, hasn't been with naming schemes so much as a
lack of documentation for what are probably some potentially very useful
modules.

Regards,

Dan