It seems to me our new package system runs into trouble if two people write packages that use the same connection name. Let's say we have two packages, alice-tree and bob-tree, both of which provide the collection data/red-black-tree, but both provide different interfaces (perhaps similar functionality with different naming conventions). It seems to me this is not that unlikely to happen, but once it does, those two packages are completely incompatible. They can never meaningfully be installed on the same system, and if they are, the behavior of any code depending on either becomes undefined.
Have I got this right, or have I missed some detail? If this is right, how concerned are we about this feature? The fact that packages are all spliced into a single flat collection namespace of course leads to the possibility of clashes like this, which can cause not just incompatibility between alice-tree and bob-tree, but a complete schism wherein all code depending on alice-tree at any level of indirection becomes completely disjoint from all code depending on bob-tree at any level of indirection. I've seen this kind of library incompatibility before, in the ACL2 "books", and I wrote a dissertation to try to solve it. I hope we're not repeating their mistake, but it seems like we have yet another flat namespace with no resolution mechanism. Carl Eastlund
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