At 12:46 AM 4/16/00 , Nic Ferrier wrote:
>
>My recommendation is for us to setup various packages and hope that
>people will follow them, for example:
>
>- gnu.lang
>for packages language and parser tools eg: some of the Kawa packages?
>regexps?
>
>- gnu.web
>for packages relating to HTTP and so forth (eg: GNU-Paperclips
>stuff)
>
>- gnu.network
>for stuff relating to mail
It's a possible solution. But maybe not ideal. I think splitting up the
namespace into task-oriented domains is perfect for library type projects,
when your aim is to write a comprehensive set of classes for different
domains (a'la the JDK API or Classpath), but less than perfect for
project-oriented domains such as GNU.
For example, I'm writing a mud. How do you classify that? Under
gnu.network, possibly, since a mud is in its nature very network oriented.
But, it turns out that the network module is less than 3% of my code so
it's maybe not all that appropriate after all. Under gnu.games? Well, it so
happens that I'm really writing a framework for distributed server side
components, and the mud is really just an example implementation. So
gnu.games isn't good either.
And so on. It's going to be very hard to classify the diverse and often
wide-ranging GNU projects into such categories. IBM is possibly the largest
vendor of open Java packages and they seem to do fine with
com.ibm.packagename. Maybe what we need is not a restructure of the
namespace but a better management of the namespace. -shrug-
[snip]
>
>Whilst we're talking about this though there is the issue of what we
>do about the 2 competing GPLed java library implementations, ie:
>Classpath and Kaffe. I asked Trasnvirtual about Classpath some time
>ago and didn't get a satisfactory answer.
>
>What is the GNU policy? to support Kaffe as the VM (sorry Japhar
>peeps but that's what the site says) and Classpath as the API?
Hmm. I seem to recall that when RMS spoke in Lund, Sweden, a couple of
weeks back he endorsed Japhar. But as I think back on it, maybe he was just
encouraging people to help out with Japhar, stressing the point that Japhar
needs help.
- - -
Emil Eifrem [ [EMAIL PROTECTED] || www.eifrem.com || www.javamud.org ]
