On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 9:24 PM, Duncan Coutts
On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 19:32 -0400, David Menendez wrote:
In the interests of reducing module name collisions, I suggest reserving part of the module name space for individual packages on Hackage. Specifically, I'm suggesting that a new top-level module name, "Lib", be added to the module naming conventions, and that the children of "Lib" be reserved for the Hackage package with the same name. That is, "Lib.Foo" and "Lib.Foo.*" would be reserved for the package "Foo" on Hackage.
Note that this is entirely contrary to the existing (and well established) convention of naming according to the purpose / content of the module rather than the name of the implementation.
What I mean is, it's a significant change.
Is it?
Look at the XML category at Hackage.
formlets - no common prefix
generic-xml - all modules prefixed with Xml
HaXml - every module is prefixed with Text.XML.HaXml
hexpat - both modules are prefixed with Text.XML.Expat
HXQ - one module, prefixed with Text.XML.HXQ
hxt - 95 of 113 modules are prefixed with Text.XML.HXT
libxml - all modules prefixed with Text.XML.LibXML
tagsoup - 7 of 8 modules prefixed with Text.HTML.TagSoup
xml - all modules prefixed with Text.XML.Light
Selecting things semi-randomly from the parser category, I see:
attoparsec - all modules prefixed with Data.ParserCombinators.Attoparsec
binary - all modules prefixed with Data.Binary
binary-strict - all modules prefixed with Data.Binary.Strict
bytestringparser - all modules prefixed with Data.ParserCombinators.Attoparsec
PArrows - all modules prefixed with Text.ParserCombinators.PArrow
Parsec - all modules prefixed with Text.ParserCombinators.Parsec
parsely - all modules prefixed with Text.ParserCombinators.Parsely
polyparse - no common prefix
uulib - all modules prefixed with UU
To me, it looks like a common pattern is to give most or all of the
modules in a package a common prefix consisting of a general
classification and the package name (or a close variant). All I'm
suggesting is to give library authors the option to drop the
classification part. Trying to create a collaborative, hierarchical
classification system is a sucker's game. That's why Hackage itself
uses tags.
--
Dave Menendez