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It seems like a reasonable fix to this is to prevent name-specific owning (changing it to a group instead) -- this has the benefit that package maintainers who

It seems like a reasonable fix to this is to prevent name-specific owning (changing it to a group instead) -- this has the benefit that package maintainers who plan to maintain their packages forever can keep the same names, and those that don't can essentially fork their project and stop fixing the older version (@ <maintainer>/<project>) and force all changes to go to a new one (@ <group>/<project>) and hand off ownership as necessary. This doesn't break old consumers and it allows for a pretty graceful migration path (if you want new updates, change your version) -- can eve be helped with marking package as deprecated or repo as archived and what not.

akerl_ 7y ago
As a thought experiment: Assume Rubygems chose to operate in that way, where all gems must be owned by a group rather than an individual user. Then, assume that the most flexible option is for each gem to be owned by a unique group: that way even if two gems are maintained by the same users right now, they use two distinct groups in case that ownership changes in the future. We might as well just name the “group” the same as the gem name, since only one gem is managed by each group. So now the “purescript” group maintains “purescript”, the “pry” group maintains “pry”, etc. As syntactic sugar for users, since the group name and gem name will always match, why make them type both? Let’s have all the commands support just referencing the gem name. If somebody wants to fork a gem and release it, their group and gem get a new name. I think there’s a pretty compelling case that package managers should support group ACLing on publishing (giving multiple humans the first-class right to publish using individual creds to a group namespace, with the ability to add/remove users from the group over time. But once you’ve done that, the distinction between explicit group-name-in-package-path and changing-name-to-fork (so the difference between fork-group/orig-name and orig-name_fork-group) seems to shrink.
- thetrainfold 7y ago
  Could it help to force long names, preventing simple, 'elegant' names?
  - akerl_ 7y ago
    For what it’s worth, I think I actually like the idea of mandating a 2-part namespace, as the way to force “long” names (where “long” means “with enough context to make forking easier and more obvious”). I just wanted to call out that “force namespacing” isn’t a silver bullet for the issue. A better feature-add might be supporting dependency replacements. For example, pre-modules, Go had an issue where if you had a dependency and I forked it, I had to go through all my code and replace references to your import path with mine. If I depended on something that depended on you, I was out of luck (or had to vendor and regex or a variety of other hacks). Now, with go modules, I can do a “replace” in my go.mod and sub in my fork for yours. That has enabled me to be much more flexible with my use of forked repositories, and most languages don’t have a direct parallel.
- hardwaresofton 7y ago
  > Assume Rubygems chose to operate in that way, where all gems must be owned by a group rather than an individual user. Sorry, this wasn't my premise -- I meant to have this as an option. As in <user>/<project> or <group>/project>. > Then, assume that the most flexible option is for each gem to be owned by a unique group: that way even if two gems are maintained by the same users right now, they use two distinct groups in case that ownership changes in the future. > We might as well just name the “group” the same as the gem name, since only one gem is managed by each group. So now the “purescript” group maintains “purescript”, the “pry” group maintains “pry”, etc. I don't agree -- even if it's always group-a/purescript I think the distinction is still important, because in this case previous-group/puresecript still exists, but is frozen/archived. Here's how I'm understanding the scenario you laid out: 1. group-a/purescript is created 2. purescript changes ownership, group-b is going to be publishing it going forward 3. group-b/purescript is created 4. group-a/purescript freezes/archives/deprecates itself 5. group-b/purescript is actively developed The fact that "group-b" is the "right" purescript is arbitrary/subjective to some degree. > I think there’s a pretty compelling case that package managers should support group ACLing on publishing (giving multiple humans the first-class right to publish using individual creds to a group namespace, with the ability to add/remove users from the group over time. But once you’ve done that, the distinction between explicit group-name-in-package-path and changing-name-to-fork (so the difference between fork-group/orig-name and orig-name_fork-group) seems to shrink. I think these two issues are a bit separate. Letting people dynamically change who owns/can publish to a repository is one way to solve this problem, but I think it's more complex than the fork-and-move approach. IMO if some user wants to give up/transfer their repo, they: 1. find someone else to take over if they want 2. freeze/archive/whatever their repo 3. let the person fork & continue their work An ownership change should be opt in, unless it was known @ package creation time that ownership would be a shared/rotated/changing/nebulous thing (which would be demonstrated by a group owning the package from the beginning).
  - akerl_ 7y ago
    I wasn’t implying you claimed that all gems needed a group, I was proposing it as part of the thought experiment. My apologies if that was unclear. To your list of examples: my point parallels your own, I think. I’m saying that given the “right” version is arbitrary and subjective, the difference between “group-b/purescript” and “purescript-group-b” is effectively nil. More concretely: if namespacing existed, you could fork “group-a/purescript” to “group-b/purescript”, but if namespacing didn’t, you could fork “purescript” to “purescript-group-b”. In either case, dependent projects need to update where they source their dependencies from. Namespacing, in my experience, tends to make the forking process slightly “cleaner”, because you avoid having a potentially non-“right” “original” (for example, “purescript” tends to look more legitimate than “purescript-group-b”). But some comments in this thread seem to paint namespacing as a hard requirement, or claim that package managers without namespacing are missing a core, mandatory feature. The case I’m presenting is that this isn’t the case: namespacing is a useful feature for several workflows, but adding namespacing doesn’t fundamentally alter the issue.
sterlind 7y ago
You could go farther and use a DNS name as a group name, then publish packages by signing with the SSL key. Anyone who doesn't want to shell out for a domain name could use a registry service that gives subdomains out. Why reinvent the governance wheel?
- hardwaresofton 7y ago
  I'd agree, but I don't think the additional complexity is worth it. I was prepared to suggest stuff like company.com/ That said, it's worked well for golang as far as I can see, despite 99% of the packages are github.com/<creator>/<package>. Here are some writeups on what the rust team decided: - https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/58 https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/58 - https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/crates-io-package-policies/1041 https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/crates-io-package-policies... Their stance seems pretty reasonable though I'm not sure I would have done the same (and it's obviously very likely I would be wrong to do the opposite of what they did): > Namespacing > In the first month with crates.io 58, a number of people have asked us aboutthe possibility of introducing namespaced packages 90. > While namespaced packages allow multiple authors to use a single, generic name, they add complexity to how packaged are referenced in Rust code and in human communication about packages. At first glance, they allow multiple authors to claim names like http, but that simply means that people will need to refer to those packages as wycats' http or reem's http, offering little benefit over package names like wycats-http or reem-http. > When we looked at package ecosystems without namespacing, we found that people tended to go with more creative names (like nokogiri instead of “tenderlove’s libxml2”). These creative names tend to be short and memorable, in part because of the lack of any hierarchy. They make it easier to communicate concisely and unambiguously about packages. They create exciting brands. And we’ve seen the success of several 10,000+ package ecosystems like NPM and RubyGems whose communities are prospering within a single namespace. > In short, we don’t think the Cargo ecosystem would be better off if Piston chose a name like bvssvni/game-engine (allowing other users to choose wycats/game-engine) instead of simply piston. > Because namespaces are strictly more complicated in a number of ways,and because they can be added compatibly in the future should they become necessary, we’re going to stick with a single shared namespace.

akerl_ 7y ago

As a thought experiment: Assume Rubygems chose to operate in that way, where all gems must be owned by a group rather than an individual user. Then, assume that the most flexible option is for each gem to be owned by a unique group: that way even if two gems are maintained by the same users right now, they use two distinct groups in case that ownership changes in the future. We might as well just name the “group” the same as the gem name, since only one gem is managed by each group. So now the “purescript” group maintains “purescript”, the “pry” group maintains “pry”, etc. As syntactic sugar for users, since the group name and gem name will always match, why make them type both? Let’s have all the commands support just referencing the gem name. If somebody wants to fork a gem and release it, their group and gem get a new name. I think there’s a pretty compelling case that package managers should support group ACLing on publishing (giving multiple humans the first-class right to publish using individual creds to a group namespace, with the ability to add/remove users from the group over time. But once you’ve done that, the distinction between explicit group-name-in-package-path and changing-name-to-fork (so the difference between fork-group/orig-name and orig-name_fork-group) seems to shrink.

thetrainfold 7y ago
Could it help to force long names, preventing simple, 'elegant' names?
- akerl_ 7y ago
  For what it’s worth, I think I actually like the idea of mandating a 2-part namespace, as the way to force “long” names (where “long” means “with enough context to make forking easier and more obvious”). I just wanted to call out that “force namespacing” isn’t a silver bullet for the issue. A better feature-add might be supporting dependency replacements. For example, pre-modules, Go had an issue where if you had a dependency and I forked it, I had to go through all my code and replace references to your import path with mine. If I depended on something that depended on you, I was out of luck (or had to vendor and regex or a variety of other hacks). Now, with go modules, I can do a “replace” in my go.mod and sub in my fork for yours. That has enabled me to be much more flexible with my use of forked repositories, and most languages don’t have a direct parallel.
hardwaresofton 7y ago
> Assume Rubygems chose to operate in that way, where all gems must be owned by a group rather than an individual user. Sorry, this wasn't my premise -- I meant to have this as an option. As in <user>/<project> or <group>/project>. > Then, assume that the most flexible option is for each gem to be owned by a unique group: that way even if two gems are maintained by the same users right now, they use two distinct groups in case that ownership changes in the future. > We might as well just name the “group” the same as the gem name, since only one gem is managed by each group. So now the “purescript” group maintains “purescript”, the “pry” group maintains “pry”, etc. I don't agree -- even if it's always group-a/purescript I think the distinction is still important, because in this case previous-group/puresecript still exists, but is frozen/archived. Here's how I'm understanding the scenario you laid out: 1. group-a/purescript is created 2. purescript changes ownership, group-b is going to be publishing it going forward 3. group-b/purescript is created 4. group-a/purescript freezes/archives/deprecates itself 5. group-b/purescript is actively developed The fact that "group-b" is the "right" purescript is arbitrary/subjective to some degree. > I think there’s a pretty compelling case that package managers should support group ACLing on publishing (giving multiple humans the first-class right to publish using individual creds to a group namespace, with the ability to add/remove users from the group over time. But once you’ve done that, the distinction between explicit group-name-in-package-path and changing-name-to-fork (so the difference between fork-group/orig-name and orig-name_fork-group) seems to shrink. I think these two issues are a bit separate. Letting people dynamically change who owns/can publish to a repository is one way to solve this problem, but I think it's more complex than the fork-and-move approach. IMO if some user wants to give up/transfer their repo, they: 1. find someone else to take over if they want 2. freeze/archive/whatever their repo 3. let the person fork & continue their work An ownership change should be opt in, unless it was known @ package creation time that ownership would be a shared/rotated/changing/nebulous thing (which would be demonstrated by a group owning the package from the beginning).
- akerl_ 7y ago
  I wasn’t implying you claimed that all gems needed a group, I was proposing it as part of the thought experiment. My apologies if that was unclear. To your list of examples: my point parallels your own, I think. I’m saying that given the “right” version is arbitrary and subjective, the difference between “group-b/purescript” and “purescript-group-b” is effectively nil. More concretely: if namespacing existed, you could fork “group-a/purescript” to “group-b/purescript”, but if namespacing didn’t, you could fork “purescript” to “purescript-group-b”. In either case, dependent projects need to update where they source their dependencies from. Namespacing, in my experience, tends to make the forking process slightly “cleaner”, because you avoid having a potentially non-“right” “original” (for example, “purescript” tends to look more legitimate than “purescript-group-b”). But some comments in this thread seem to paint namespacing as a hard requirement, or claim that package managers without namespacing are missing a core, mandatory feature. The case I’m presenting is that this isn’t the case: namespacing is a useful feature for several workflows, but adding namespacing doesn’t fundamentally alter the issue.

sterlind 7y ago

You could go farther and use a DNS name as a group name, then publish packages by signing with the SSL key. Anyone who doesn't want to shell out for a domain name could use a registry service that gives subdomains out. Why reinvent the governance wheel?

hardwaresofton 7y ago
I'd agree, but I don't think the additional complexity is worth it. I was prepared to suggest stuff like company.com/ That said, it's worked well for golang as far as I can see, despite 99% of the packages are github.com/<creator>/<package>. Here are some writeups on what the rust team decided: - https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/58 https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/58 - https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/crates-io-package-policies/1041 https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/crates-io-package-policies... Their stance seems pretty reasonable though I'm not sure I would have done the same (and it's obviously very likely I would be wrong to do the opposite of what they did): > Namespacing > In the first month with crates.io 58, a number of people have asked us aboutthe possibility of introducing namespaced packages 90. > While namespaced packages allow multiple authors to use a single, generic name, they add complexity to how packaged are referenced in Rust code and in human communication about packages. At first glance, they allow multiple authors to claim names like http, but that simply means that people will need to refer to those packages as wycats' http or reem's http, offering little benefit over package names like wycats-http or reem-http. > When we looked at package ecosystems without namespacing, we found that people tended to go with more creative names (like nokogiri instead of “tenderlove’s libxml2”). These creative names tend to be short and memorable, in part because of the lack of any hierarchy. They make it easier to communicate concisely and unambiguously about packages. They create exciting brands. And we’ve seen the success of several 10,000+ package ecosystems like NPM and RubyGems whose communities are prospering within a single namespace. > In short, we don’t think the Cargo ecosystem would be better off if Piston chose a name like bvssvni/game-engine (allowing other users to choose wycats/game-engine) instead of simply piston. > Because namespaces are strictly more complicated in a number of ways,and because they can be added compatibly in the future should they become necessary, we’re going to stick with a single shared namespace.