On 10/19/05, Nate Wiger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My concern is that we're solving problems that don't really exist in > real-world Perl usage. Are there really two competing authors of DBI? > Or, for any product, do two people really try to market "SuperWidget"? > No, one person just changes to "SuperGadget". And with URI's, one person > gets "amazon.com". Sorry, name taken. > > I think we're actually *encouraging* problems by allowing long, clashing > names. Pretty soon all DBI modules will have to start with > > use DBI:TIMB; > > Because "JEFFSTER" decided to upload his DBI (Derivative Binary Index) > module. > > I think it will have the opposite effect of what we're trying to avoid.
I'm of two minds about this, in large part because I have two experiences with the current CPAN. My first CPAN module was taking over PDF::Template, originally written by DFERRANCE. Now, it's maintained by RKINYON, soon to be maintained by RKINYON and STEVAN due to amazing contributions by AUTRIJUS (or whatever those characters are supposed to be). Now, how are authorship-changes going to be handled, particularly in the face of having two PDF::Templates out there already? Everyone is disambiguating their modules with PDF::Template-DFERRANCE vs. PDF::Template-JRANDOM. Now, they cannot upgrade to my latest feature because that requires changing every place they had hard-coded DFERRANCE. Or, will the package system map PDF::Template-DFERRANCE to PDF::Template-RKINYON? The second experience is one I'm going through right now. I was adding a feature to Tree:Simple a few weeks back and realized that it needed to be gutted to do what I needed it to do. With the encouragement of the author, I rewrote it completely. My development name for the distro is "Forest", but I have Tree and Tree::Binary as the packages. (Yeah, it's a math joke.) Except, there's two problems with that - Tree is a TLN (top-level namespace) with a lot of unrelated distros beneath it. And, Tree is owned by someone else, but that person hasn't updated Tree in 6 years. And, Tree::Binary is owned by the same guy who owns Tree::Simple. How is that going to work in P6? (For the record, I still haven't figured out what I'm going to do yet. Check Perlmonks for the SOPW in a few minutes.) Rob
