4 ms·

What's right with package namespaces? How do they help at all? Where's the benifit? The cost is that package paths are longer and hard to remember. Also confusi

by rat87 6y ago

What's right with package namespaces? How do they help at all? Where's the benifit? The cost is that package paths are longer and hard to remember. Also confusing because multiple packages can have the same name > I have to deal with name-squatting and a much more difficult naming process for crates as pretty much every short, meaningful name in English is taken at this point Squatting is not a major problem just name your package yourname-xml or randomname instead of yourname.xml

andrewzah 6y ago
"How do they help at all? Where's the benifit? [sic]" The obvious one is people can put packages under their own namespace and not worry about naming collisions. If this were really such an issue, things like github,maven, or just about any other library manager would be impossible to work with. But that isn't the case. "The cost is that package paths are longer and hard to remember. Also confusing because multiple packages can have the same name" In 5+ years of programming I have not once had an issue due to namespaces. In both systems you still need to remember the author + repo name. Both systems would have multiple competing projects for a problem space. Etc. It's up to you (the engineer) to do your research before adding a library to your project. Namespaces or the lack of them will never fix that. Name length? Really? Is ~5-15 chars vs ~20-25 so important? It's not like we're memorizing these things. This is not worth removing namespaces for. Both systems have issues due to things being named the same. One example in rust is `http` and its related types, which get referred to by multiple crates. I ran into that recently when I pulled in various networking crates into the same project. Removing namespaces doesn't fix this. "Squatting is not a major problem just name your package yourname-xml or randomname instead of yourname.xml" I'm sorry but I cannot agree with this. Naming should not be a compromise. There's a reason we don't use random names or just random numbers.

by rat87 6y ago

andrewzah 6y ago

"How do they help at all? Where's the benifit? [sic]" The obvious one is people can put packages under their own namespace and not worry about naming collisions. If this were really such an issue, things like github,maven, or just about any other library manager would be impossible to work with. But that isn't the case. "The cost is that package paths are longer and hard to remember. Also confusing because multiple packages can have the same name" In 5+ years of programming I have not once had an issue due to namespaces. In both systems you still need to remember the author + repo name. Both systems would have multiple competing projects for a problem space. Etc. It's up to you (the engineer) to do your research before adding a library to your project. Namespaces or the lack of them will never fix that. Name length? Really? Is ~5-15 chars vs ~20-25 so important? It's not like we're memorizing these things. This is not worth removing namespaces for. Both systems have issues due to things being named the same. One example in rust is `http` and its related types, which get referred to by multiple crates. I ran into that recently when I pulled in various networking crates into the same project. Removing namespaces doesn't fix this. "Squatting is not a major problem just name your package yourname-xml or randomname instead of yourname.xml" I'm sorry but I cannot agree with this. Naming should not be a compromise. There's a reason we don't use random names or just random numbers.