On May 10, 2005, at 5:26 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
* The '<namespace>' tag in parcel.xml would be deprecated and phased out
Removing the ability for assigning a custom namespace name for a parcel makes sense because they currently don't buy you any uniqueness really -- you're still at the mercy of both the python package/module namespace and the repository path hierarchy.
Namespaces are currently being used in parcel.xml to refer to parcel items (and child items within those parcels) because, well, they need *some* way to identify items in the repository. In the past, those namespaces were actually coded as repository paths ("//parcels/ osaf/contentmodel/", etc.), and switching them over to URLs seemed a less evil thing to do (expecially since libxml2 complained about namespaces that weren't URIs).
As long as we have XML defining repository items which refer to other repository items, we need some mechanism to uniquely specify those item references. If it's not via XML namespace abuse, we'll need an alternative. So perhaps for now, until parcel.xml goes away, we stick with using the XML namespace names to refer to parcel items. By removing the ability to assign any random namespace name to your parcel, Philip is making it at least possible to calculate a namespace name from a python-based parcel, which otherwise wouldn't be possible.
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