Re: [PEPr] Comment on RFC::Prefix all packages with P_

On Jul 11, 2006, at 5:38 PM, Alan Knowles wrote:

Alan Knowles (http://pear.php.net/user/alan_k) has commented on the proposal for RFC::Prefix all packages with P_. Comment: This one's a catch-22 by the time we rename all the packages to P_* or PEAR_* PHP6 might be out with namespaces... -> in which case we end up changing them again.. +1 on this. Prefixing everything and managing the dependency spaghetti afterwards is a massive effort, requiring coordination of /all/ PEAR devs, and a huge burden on QA when they pick up the slack for devs who are MIA.

All that effort to solve a problem that is not, in my opinion, a big deal right now, and which makes (again, IMO) PEAR harder to use. Also, nobody has mentioned how this breaks existing package naming; for every existing package, we'd need a new package with the prefix, e.g. Foo -> P_Foo. This also would require FS layout changes, as the package classes would now be in $php_dir/P/Foo - needless pollution of your filesystem. And here's the kicker: prefixes are just a crappy implementation of namespaces for languages that don't support them. It's a hack at best. Why expend all that effort for an ugly hack that reduces the usability of PEAR? +1 for waiting for real namespaces to solve the problem. -1 for adding any prefixes.