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

[holger krekel]

Hi Jim,

On Sun, Jun 02, 2013 at 11:25 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 3:21 PM, holger krekel <holger at 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.

In theory yes, but is a practical problem?  Similar to Donald, so far i
didn't find myself or hear much from other people that they have
problems finding good pypi names.  We have some 30K names registered
with PyPI i think -- and many top level DNS entries have millions of
names.  So the numbers don't clearly imply we have a scaling problem.

> 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.

It might still be an issue.

> ...
> > 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?

I'd think that once a group registers a "X" namespace and it is accepted 
it would give control to registering any "X.*" packages to that group.  As a
pre-condition there shouldn't be any bare "X" package existing i guess.
Clearly, the exact semantics/process would need to be thought out.

I'd like to base further discussion on actual PEP drafts with a proper
statement of practical problems.  What i personally would consider
a practical problem is this: "As a company/community we have already
N packages and we want to communicate our users through pypi names that
using the namespace 'XY.' will always get them software that we have
screened/reviewed/released ourselves.  But currently there is no way to
prevent others from releasing "ZY." prefixed software".

cheers,
holger


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