Re: Delegating ownership of namespaces named through schemers.org Jacob Matthews 31 Jan 2006 16:05 UTC

Andrew Wilcox wrote:

>I haven't thought about what a schemers.org library registry might
>look like in any kind of detail, but what I had in mind was along
>these lines.

You might want to take a look at what we're doing with PLaneT, PLT's
CPAN-like package repository (http://planet.plt-scheme.org/). We use
a central authority to hand out names and we file packages into
categories, but we separate those two features from each other --- if
you submit a package X.plt, its _name_ will be something like
("wilcox" "X.plt") but it might be _filed under_ database tools, or
metaprogramming, or maybe even both.

I'm not a fan of baking content-related hierarchies directly into
package names --- many packages don't fit neatly into one
category, and even worse if a package's purpose migrates over time,
either its name will become misleading or it will have to change. And
the advantages you get over having a taxonomy that's just overlaid
seems minimal; you might get a little extra readability in code
you've written, but in practice that doesn't seem to be a big problem
anyway.

-jacob