Hi all,
Recently the "doc._*" reservation has been causing me trouble when
pulling in "arbitrary" JSON from various sources that also use the
underscore prefixed names for things (HAL [1], vnd.error [2], other
APIs). I've also hit the wall several times when trying to import
filesystem contents (Sphinx, ghpages, and the like) that use _*
prefixing for their "special folders."
As such, I'd like to propose the following:
1. Begin storing new reserved terms in doc._.* (rather than doc._*).
- this gives developers one object to look into for the meta-data
about a doc
- you can see the scope creep of our current doc._* best in the
replicator status messages.
- doc._ replication_* would become doc._.replication.*
2. Move "magic" API endpoints under "/_/" term as well (for the sake of
attachments.
- _design/doc would stay the same
- but the child endpoints would live under "_design/doc/_/*"
- _design/doc/_/view/by_date
- _design/doc/_/list/by_date/ul
- _design/doc/_/rewrite
I realize these are extreme API shifts, and would need to wait for
CouchDB 2.0.
The first steps this direction would be to put new reserved word keys
into a "doc._.*" namespace going forward. Closer to the "cut over" for
2.0 duplicates of the existing keys (doc._id, doc._rev, especially)
could also live at their new underscore prefixed names (doc._.id,
doc._.rev) which would give devs a chance to migrate code and content.
Doing this would:
1. Give us "limitless" space to add content.
2. Encourage a namespacing pattern for things like doc._.replication.*
or other logically grouped content.
3. Free up CouchDB to accept a far broader range of content and remove
the "hey, you can't put that there! I was here first!" errors. :)
Thanks for considering this,
Benjamin
[1] http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html
[2] https://github.com/blongden/vnd.error
