[racket-dev] Package compatibility

Yesterday, Jay McCarthy wrote:
> Planet attempts to solve this problem technically by (a) having all
> collections be prefixed by <author>/<package-name> and (b) mandating
> a centralized server that enforces unique <author>s and unique
> <package-name>s per author. Since Racket packages don't have a
> mandated central server we can't enforce uniqueness like that. (i.e.
> even if we mandated the prefix by <package-name>, there's no way to
> enforce unique package names across the universe without a central
> server.) Furthermore, bringing <package-name>s in to the code would
> give us /internal linking/ which Racket packages are designed to
> avoid for other reasons.
> 
> Since technical solutions to this problem are lacking,

An easy way to make it a non problem would be to eliminate the extra
indirection that is in package names: if the package that Carl is
asking about is *named* "data/red-black-tree" then it clearly
conflicts with another package with the same name.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!