At 3:12 AM +0100 15/12/30, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
On 30/12/15 02:25, Pascal Costanza wrote: [...]
Basing package names on domain names provides the illusion that you have unique names, but domain names come and go, companies change owners, repositories move to different hosting servers, etc., etc., so they are not as stable as one might think. If people use sufficiently long package names that can then be renamed locally using package-local nicknames, that's sufficient, IMHO.
Oh, you're right. Now I see the light. I will therefore rename my com.informatimago.* package into 2915BB3ECC3D45029DBF41BD48508E2E.* And let's not talk about the 3 or 4 different CLON packages we have...
It might be useful to have the option to nickname away any package names which come over as unwelcome advertising or otherwise inappropriate. In effect renaming symbols' print form so their package name matches their purpose from our own pov.
Any standard might include an ASDF or meta declaration form which states package names used by any systems, such that others who use/integrate those systems know what package naming conflicts they face, and can side step them conveniently at top level. It can be tricky to handle some package name overlaps.
In our glorious far lisp future, there'll be many thousands of interleaved systems with a multitude of package names, hence a race to be first to bag the choice ones (as in domain name squatters, sales, extortionists, self publicists, etc). Some mechanism for disappearing unwanted package names but leaving functional state identical, might be a necessity. Then we can all have our own sys and si roots.