Namespacing issues ...

[Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com>]

Hi Guys,

	I have been recently looking into the issues of namespacing.
Clearly it is not really possible for Gnome to play a serious part in
the wider OMG / CORBA community, particulary in partnership with large
companies, without getting a sensible set of Namespacing guidelines.

	Now; in order to save Gnome people as much pain as possible,
Miguel and I have agreed on the following strategy:

	We register two toplevel domains with the OMG ( if at all
possible ) NB. Toplevel domains are a valuable commodity. These are:

	GNOME/		and
	Bonobo/

	Bonobo/ is reserved for the component model and various
standard Gnome component services. Everything else goes in GNOME/

	Hence we have:

	GNOME/
		Evolution/
		Nautilus/
		Eog/
		GnomeDB/
		GDA/

	or whatever.

	Whilst a lot of IDL already obeys this conventions; there
are unfortunately a number of things that will need changing, the
sooner the better really. A pernicious drop off eg. is in gnome-core
the help_browser interface seems to have been added just outside the
GNOME module that the rest of the interfaces are ( correctly ) in.

	Similarly, it would be good to move gnome-lib's desktop
interfaces into GNOME/Desktop.

	So; Please can people make a start at sorting these problems;
mostly they can be done by simple perl scripts of the form:

#!/usr/bin/perl -pi.bak

    s/Eog_/GNOME_Eog_/g;
    s/Eog\//GNOME\/Eog\//g;

( clearly with adding a few extra module GNOME {} 's to some IDL )

	As if this mail was not controversial enough; might I suggest
that if you are running such a script over your IDL, that it might
be a good time to migrate to the new API naming convention as outlined
in bonobo/doc/FAQ.

	In summary a totaly uncontrolled namespace is a frightening
thing for corporate adopters of Bonobo, it is good to have a
consistant naming scheme, registering the Foo/ Baa/, Boo/
etc. namespaces with the OMG is not likely to be a viable option so
it'd be good to get this fixed RSN.

	Thanks,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot