Re: PEAR2 package naming standards (namespace usage)

On Aug 25, 2008, at 8:20 PM, Michael Gauthier wrote:

The proposed spec looks good and whatever ends up being finalized, I'll gladly port and maintain all packages for which I'm responsible.

Glad to hear!

One concern I have with the proposal is of making namespaces and packages synonymous. When we do this, we lose one of the intended uses of namespaces which is to provide a categorizational hierarchy for classes. For example, I maintain the PEAR1 Crypt_GPG package. In the proposed standard, the namespace would become pear2::crypt_gpg. I think it should really be pear2::encryption::gpg. I'm sure one of the reasons for the direct package-name-to-namespace mapping is ease of development from svn, and if The PEAR Group feels it is a sacrifice that needs to be made, so be it.

This is definitely something we, as the PEAR Community, will need to think about. A great package might be a pear2::encryption package that has support for encryption drivers. <personal opinion - i.e., not that of pear-group@> This does bring up an excellent point. In many cases, it may be better to change the packages around a bit for better organization instead of doing a straight port. PEAR1 hasn't always fostered the best design so much as the first. Starting with a clean slate and no BC concerns definitely frees everyone up to re-implement everything the way they always wanted to :-) </personal opinion>

My last concern is more a matter of preference. Since PEAR1 does not support namespaces, do we have to use 'pear2' as the root namespace? I'd much rather 'pear'.

I believe the decision was made by the first PEAR Group to adopt "pear2" as the vendor level namespace to differentiate between the two libraries. I know at one point, switching names was even considered, but they landed on "pear2" to say we're different, but still continue the name recognition of "pear" as a whole. Some from the first PEAR Group can correct me if I'm wrong... -T