Re: Namespaces in Core

On 2/6/2017 9:47 PM, Nikita Popov wrote: > I'm strongly against use of the PHP namespace as a blanket namespace > for bundled PHP extensions. The PHP namespace should be used only > for functionality that is actually in some way related to PHP. For > example, the php-ast extension could reasonably be namespaced as > php\ast, as it provides an AST for PHP specifically. Similarly the > tokenizer extension could reasonably be namespaced as php\tokenizer. > > Extensions which are not of this type should not live in the PHP > namespace, because they don't have anything specifically to do with > php, apart from the circumstance that they happen to be bundled at > the current point in time. Remember that extension may move from > being bundled to being in PECL and vice versa. If we decide to bundle > the MongoDB extension with php, would we rename the currently used > MongoDB namespace to PHP\MongoDB? If we decided to move it back to > PECL, would the namespace go back to just MongoDB? Or would it stay > PHP\MongoDB, despite not being part of PHP anymore? Should all new > extensions be written with a PHP namespace to account for the > possibility of the extension being bundled with PHP at a later point > in time (even if there are no concrete plans to do so)? > > I would answer No to these questions. The namespace MongoDB is not, > as you say, "random", it is *meaningful*. The namespace PHP is (with > the exceptions in the first paragraph notwithstanding) meaningless > and an artifact of the distribution mechanism, a mechanism which may > change over time. > > Regards, Nikita > I thought about this too. I hope you understood that the main reasoning for me to choose a well known namespace prefix is related to auto-loading and when to trigger it. The lack of function and constant auto-loading is a pain and having well known prefixes could solve the issue since we would never require to even look at the auto-loader if the namespace starts with php. Obviously this could be solved for C extensions by allowing them to register another prefix that should not be auto-loaded: Sodium, MongoDB, ... Another solution could be to use pecl as their prefix. Although this couples it to the packaging system which might not be so nice. Any name that is tied to a company name or something else that makes things impossible for users to claim (Oracle, MongoDB, ...) is not a problem. In case of sodium that would probably be Paragon but Sodium might be fine too. I am not the judge here, the only thing I want is to ensure that this does not go unseen and that the potential of breaking something is real if we choose a random route like some others do. Not saying that we cannot do it, big ecosystems live without problems doing the same. However, it should be a very conscious choice and none that is taken lightly: meaning rules! -- Richard "Fleshgrinder" Fussenegger