Top-level package names, UX questions

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 9:23 AM, Alexander Sack <asac at canonical.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 4:02 PM, Gustavo Niemeyer
> <gustavo.niemeyer at canonical.com> wrote:
>> With juju we used an alias to the fully defined namespace, and it
>> works pretty well.
>>
>> As a side note, the convention of <package name>.<user> feels somewhat
>> unfortunate. I'm not sure if there's still time to tweak it or if you
>> are married with the concept to a deep level already. If possible, I
>> would try to design a convention that is slightly harder to obtain
>> ambiguous interpretation from. As example based on the few mentions in
>> your text, consider the effect of having a user named "start".
>
> We are not married to the current syntax/scheme, but we didn't come up
> with something better. Any ideas?

I would look for a convention that more clearly separates the
components unambiguously. You have control of the allowed syntax on
package names, and can also define what the convention for extensions
is, so it should be easy to avoid the situation described above. Note
that if you namespace the package itself, it may not be necessary to
namespace everything inside it (if it's user/package, then it's okay
to have user/package/foo).

Rather than trying to come up with a single proposal here, I'd rather
keep these ideas in mind.  If they make sense, let's meet to
brainstorm on options.


gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net