From: Mark Wilson <mwilson13@...>
Date: 2003-01-26T14:22:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Why "like Perl"?   was: RAA proposal

I agree with everything Daniel said ;-)

I think there are two levels to the discussion: (1) a usable interface 
to the RAA and (2) namespacing for libraries and modules.  While the 
two are related, in that they involve categorization within an 
identical subject matter domain, I think they should be treated as 
though they were separate because they represent solutions to different 
problems.

On the interface issue, a range of users with differing knowledge 
levels about Ruby and other subjects are trying to find something 
useful for their specific problem; this is clearly different than an 
expert user managing namespaces.  For user access, an information 
hierarchy can be helpful.  For namespaces, too much hierarchy is 
probably unhelpful.

Having said that, the interface to the RAA should not violate 
namespacing decisions -- what this means to me is that, for example, 
two modules under a science related namespace should not appear under 
two separate categories (both should appear under science).  As a 
specific example, a genomics module and a genomics imaging module that 
are both in a science namespace should both be under the science 
category in the standard RAA interface.

Finally, RAA entries could have second (optional) category assignments 
that would be used for display and sorting purposes so that a single 
entry could appear under more than one category.  I would prefer that 
this be displayed only upon request of the user because I think a 
standard "single inheritance" interface makes for greater usefulness.