On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 3:21 PM, holger krekel holger@merlinux.eu wrote:
On Sat, Jun 01, 2013 at 11:57 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
In the Python community, we've been pretty laid back about how we name packages. When we were small, this made sense. It doesn't make sense any more.
I've heart this sentiment before, but would like to read more clearly stated problems.
I thought the problem was pretty clear: name collisions.
There's a parallel thread on how to detect and reclaim names that are taken and unused. I think if we had a more systematic way of naming packages, this wouldn't be an issue.
We should not have to come up with a process for recognizing squatters on simple package names. We should have something more systematic, IMO.
Unfortunately, I think the sanest way of avoiding most package name issues is to base them on domains, as is done in the Java world. This goes against the Python philosophy of preferring flat to nested, but I still think it's better than trying to police squatters, or to encouraging races to claim top-level names.
I am not sure that tying to DNS namespacing is the only solution here (whatever the problem is exactly :).
It's not the only solution, but it's a pretty easy one. It avoids (more more precisely reuses) a central naming authority. It's the technique used by the java ecosystem and by XML namespaces, for example.
For a while, many of us have been pretty careful to use namespaces for new packages to mitigate this issue. For example, the zc namespace is a shorter version of com.zope, but at some point, it won't be fair for us to claim zc for ourselves.
I wonder if we could allow people/groups to apply (to humans) for a namespace which they can subsequently control, like the "zc.*" one.
We could. Maybe that's the most palatable alternative. It has the huge benefit of promoting relatively flat, Pythonic, namespaces.
It has disadvantages:
- We have to set up some sort of naming authority.
- It's probably not scalable.
Everyone could continue to push non-namespaced (flat) packages to pypi like now but the names couldn't take the form of namespaced ones.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here.
Are you saying someone could publish a package named: "zc", bit not "zc.foo"?
Or are you saying that publication of a package named "bar" would prevent someone from creating a "bar" namespace, and the other way around?
Jim