[Melbourne-pm] Namespace Guidelines?

[Paul Fenwick]

G'day Kat and Melb.pm,

Kat Grant wrote:

> Does anyone know of any nice articles outlining guidelines for OO  
> perl namespaces?

You can find some advice under "Select a name for the module" in perlmodlib.
 There's also the perl modules list, which is filled with incredibly
pedantic CPAN admins.  While it's primarily useful in getting namespaces
sorted for upload to CPAN, if anyone does have a good set of guidelines
written down, they will.  You can try dropping a mail to them at
modules at perl.org, or you can do what I do and find Adam Kennedy as my local
CPAN admin on IRC (he's usually found as 'alias' on #win32 on irc.perl.org).

When uploading to CPAN, my general rules would be:

	* Go from most general to most specific
	* Follow existing conventions when possible
	* Talk to others for a sanity check

The "Local::" namespace is reserved for modules that will never be
distributed (and never appear on CPAN); however it appears there's also a
guarantee[1] that there won't be any modules on CPAN which contain
underscores.  So a prefix in the style of My_Business:: can be used if you
want to be absolutely sure there'll never be any sort of conflict.

In my experience, the reserved namespaces look awful, so like many companies
we've picked a short and obvious prefix for our internal modules (in our
case, PTA:: ).

As for OO guidelines, it's fairly natural for one to expect containership to
mean inheritance.  For example, Bird is a parent of Bird::Chicken is a
parent of Bird::Chicken::Australorp.  If you have nested packages that
*don't* have inheritance (for internal modules) then I suggest you consider
if there's a way to name about that.  The same applies in the reverse; do
you have inherited classes that end up in completely different packages?  If
you do, is there a good reason?

Apologies for the not particularly in-depth response, however if you do find
a good set of guidelines written down, I'd love to see them.

All the best,

	Paul

[1] According to perlmodlib

-- 
Paul Fenwick <pjf at perltraining.com.au> | http://perltraining.com.au/
Director of Training                   | Ph:  +61 3 9354 6001
Perl Training Australia                | Fax: +61 3 9354 2681