On 10/20/05, Nate Wiger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Larry Wall wrote: > > I think there can be some kind of community metainformation that sets > > defaults appropriately. And if not, the site/project can certainly > > establish defaults. On the other hand, a lot of projects do simply > > want to specify the version and author explicitly eveyr time, > > and they'd rather tweak it by hand (or by script) if they want to > > change it, since then at least they know when they need to rerun the > > regression tests. > > I think it's a laudable idea in theory, but not necessarily application. > I've done quite alot of Perl programming, and I've never run into this > personally. Who has? (Really, I'm being serious.) Are there really > multiple modules sharing interchangeable interfaces? Or instances where > we want to allow the same name to mean different concepts depending on > the author?
Please see http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=501496 for more on the issue of names. My Tree module and Schwern's Tree distro have almost zero interface compatibility. They both represent N-ary trees, except mine exposes the tree interface and Schwern's is just a OO interface for a hash implemented as a tree. My module is descended from Tree::Simple, except ::Simple almost never is. The same thing goes for my version of Tree::Binary and Stevan Little's. Two completely different interfaces, but here we're solving the same problem. The major difference between mine and his is that mine inherits from my Tree whereas his is an independent module. This means that adding transparent persistence (which is what my rewrite does) to his module is a bit of a bear. Hence, you might want to use RKINYON's Tree::Binary over STEVAN's Tree::Binary. Or, what should I call mine? (This is a real question - if you have any suggestions, please let me know!) > There's no logical difference between: > > use DBI:TIMB > use DBI:JEFFSTER > > And: > > use TIMB::DBI > use JEFFSTER::DBI No, this isn't any good, either. I took over DFERRANCE's PDF::Template implementation. He has nothing to do with it anymore. So, DFERRANCE::PDF::Template now becomes RKINYON::PDF::Template? Or, does RKINYON now maintain something in the DFERRANCE namespace? What on earth does the name DFERRANCE provide, except for an additional layer of confusion. > Anyways, I don't like the idea of people being able to upload > identically named modules to CPAN. I think that's a very bad idea. See > Rob Kinyon's message. I think you misinterpreted my message. My point is that uploading things with the same name is a good plan, but it has to be thought through, especially given the points I raised. But, I very much agree that it should happen. I'd like to propose a slight shift in emphasis. I think that more focus needs to be made in project-wide or namespace-wide disambiguation and module aliasing. If I was able to say in my CP6AN distro that I depend on DBI:2.05-:cpan-TIMB and that I'm going to call it DBI, then all the files in my distro should automatically have that alias built in. This means that anyone wanting to use DBI:cpan-JRANDOM in their code can alias it as DBI on a project-wide basis, yet still be able to use my distro and everything be ok. The important thing here, I think, is that while aliasing package names is a lexical action, there can be a larger lexical scope. It may be that we need the concept of a "Project", along with Module, Package, Class, and Role. This way, the Project states "Whenever you load a file that matches the criteria below, apply the following lexical _stuff_." Rob
