[Distutils] Sooner or later, we're going to have to be more formal about how we name packages.

[Jim Fulton]

On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Noah Kantrowitz <noah at coderanger.net> wrote:
>
> On Jun 1, 2013, at 11:09 AM, Jim Fulton wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Jun 1, 2013, at 2:01 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> I am opposed to this. Requiring someone to have purchased a domain adds a
>>> significant
>>> to publishing a project. If there are no requirements that they have
>>> purchased the domain
>>> then it's nothing more than a convention and something that anyone who wants
>>> to do
>>> this can do.
>>
>> Fair enough. A common variation on this scenario, which avoids
>> purchasing a domain,
>> is to use a code hosting domain and project name, so, for example:
>> org.bitbucket.j1m.foo.
>>
>> Of course, using a domain name without owning it is a form of squatting.
>
> All that means is either we move the problem (instead of one shared namespace we two or three common ones)

I don't understand why you say two or three. There would be as many
namespaces as there are
domains or VCS accounts.  There would be many distinct namespaces,
each controlled controlled
by a single user or organization.

> or we do it github-style and just prepend usernames at which point you can skip the whole URI thing because usernames must be unique for reasons of general sanity and I don't think it is a huge deal that a single person can't have two packages of the same name.

That's an option. (I assume you mean PyPI user names.) It would be
more attractive if PyPI supported
organizational accounts. (I sure wish it did.)  I can't say I find the
idea of tying a package name to an
account name attractive, but it's a good alternative for projects
without a domain.

> Github-style namespacing just means that either names all suck (django/django, kennethreitz/requests) or you need to come up with some way to map un-namespaced names to their canonical form and we are more or less back at square one. If people don't mind the sucky names, they can already put that in their package name if the bare version is taken, so QED this is already doable in the current system, it just looks so ugly that no one wants to do it and enforcing the ugly seems like a poor option.

My observation of the java world is that most packages that get
published to central repositories end
up having domain based names.  Even that sucks to some degree because
flat is better than nested.
I just don't think the current ad-hoc mechanism we're using now is scalable.

Jim

-- 
Jim Fulton
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfulton