Regarding your comments:
-------------------------------------
"It's like making your hash table really, really big in the hopes you won't
have a collision."
The size of the domain name space is what it is, and isn't getting adjusted
in any way to fill the need for package naming.
"It purports to be some type of globally unique identifier when in fact it
is not."
Are you really implying that an e-mail address and/or a domain is not
globally unique'?
-------------------------------------
I think you are missing the point of most of the objections that have
appeared here so far. IMHO they can be summed up as (a) there's no good
reason not to cooperate with an adopted convention, especially one that
works (e.g. it's not like they are doing it to solve some problem), and (b)
it certainly **is** arrogant to think that they own the three letters 'GNU'.
Do I own 'TJL'? I don't think so.
It's (as far as the Internet is concerned) culturally unsound to arbitrarily
confound even a de-facto standard or system simply because you can, and just
the fact that it hasn't caused a problem yet is no defense for such a poor
attitude. What if everyone decided to act so self-centered? Think about
that for a minute.
Regards,
TJL
-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron M. Renn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Chris Toshok <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: Prasad, Ganesh C <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sunday, September 12, 1999 3:28 PM
Subject: Re: Congratulations
>Chris Toshok ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
>> I disagree with many, many things sun has done with java, and you may
too. it
>> does (to me) seem a pointlessly small and rather silly battle to fight to
say
>> "we're just going to use gnu instead of org.gnu." The package naming
>> recommendations sun has made actually make sense. They may not serve all
the
>> purposes Per Bothner sees them as trying to serve, but they keep global
names
>> from conflicting, and add (on the outside) 20 or 30 characters per file.
why
>> bother fighting this?
>
>I'm opposed to org.gnu for the same reason that I hate email addresses
>of the form [EMAIL PROTECTED] It purports to be some type of
>globally unique identifier when in fact it is not. In the meantime,
>it requires names that are extremely verbose. At my last company
>we had two Gregory R. Barrett's. One of them ended up a gregory.r.barrett
>and the other at greg.r.barrett. It's like making your hash table
>really, really big in the hopes you won't have a collision.
>
>It's a nitpick I know, and if the GNU project had used org.gnu all along,
>I'd probably have gone along with it with no complaint. But the
>regular top level package "gnu" was chosen, and I'm happy enough with the
>way things are.
>
>--
>Aaron M. Renn ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/
>
