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Could it help to force long names, preventing simple, 'elegant' names?


For what it’s worth, I think I actually like the idea of mandating a 2-part namespace, as the way to force “long” names (where “long” means “with enough context to make forking easier and more obvious”). I just wanted to call out that “force namespacing” isn’t a silver bullet for the issue.

A better feature-add might be supporting dependency replacements. For example, pre-modules, Go had an issue where if you had a dependency and I forked it, I had to go through all my code and replace references to your import path with mine. If I depended on something that depended on you, I was out of luck (or had to vendor and regex or a variety of other hacks). Now, with go modules, I can do a “replace” in my go.mod and sub in my fork for yours. That has enabled me to be much more flexible with my use of forked repositories, and most languages don’t have a direct parallel.




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