[Boston.pm] Module naming conventions

[Steve Linberg]

I was wondering if those of you who code/maintain modules on CPAN could offer a little advice.

I've written a handful of small modules that I find myself re-using in a lot of different mod_perl applications that I do for various people. None of them are earth-shaking, but they're useful enough to me that I try to keep them up.

I also do some site hosting for some of the clients I do jobs for, and so I find that my mod_perl namespace is starting to sag with multiple versions of these modules, which is stupid. I have things like [proj_a]::ListManager.pm, [proj_b]::ListManager.pm, and so on, which are identical. Dumb.

It occured to me that maybe it's time to tighten these babies up a little and put them in a shared namespace that can be accessed by all of the projects I use them for. Whether they'd ever be good enough to consider releasing to CPAN is unclear to me now, but I'd like to avoid doing something that will cause problems later if I decide to really get my act in gear and contribute someday.

I thought this might be a good time to learn how to do a proper packaging of the modules so they could be installed via the standard "perl Makefile.PL && make && make test && make install", and I've begun to find documentation about how to do that.

As far as naming goes, though, I'm a little stuck. These little modules are really quite disparate; many are web-related, and some are just general shortcuts and code snippets. I'm guessing they should probably all be under a theoretically-private namespace that isn't currently in use, and so I was considering choosing something like "SGT" as a top level namespace, so I'd have "SGT::ListManager", "SGT::Session", and so forth, but that would presume that "SGT" would never be used as a "real" namespace on CPAN (it isn't at present, as far as I know, but who knows?).

One of the CPAN docs says to use something like "Foo_Corp" as a namespace for modules that may or may not be released to the world someday, as a way to avoid potential namespace collisions. Is a "_Corp" suffix a better way to do this, so I'd have "SGT_Corp::Foo" and so forth?

Any advice appreciated.

Cheers,

Steve Linberg

--
Steve Linberg, Chief Goblin
Silicon Goblin Technologies
http://silicongoblin.com
Be kind. Remember, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
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