Ron Garret  <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com> wrote:
+---------------
|  Pascal Costanza <pc@p-cos.net> wrote:
| > The question is not how often this happens, but what you can do if and 
| > when it happens. I am aware of situations in Java, for example, where 
| > this can lead to a situation where you have to restart to write 
| > considerable portions of your software from scratch. It's good that this 
| > danger doesn't exist in Common Lisp.
| 
| The same thing can happen in CL.  Unless you can guarantee that package 
| names are globally unique there's always the possibility of wanting to 
| combine two code bases that use the same package name.  Such name 
| clashes (for packages called "UTILITIES" for example) are not unheard of.
+---------------

The good news is tha most people have started naming their packages
with names constructed to be globally unique, such as "NET.P-COS.UTILITIES"
and "COM.FLOWNET.UTILITIES" and "ORG.RPW3.UTILS".

The bad news, of course, is that people are still distributing packages
with short non-globally-unique *nicknames* such as "UTILS", so some
conflicts still need to be fixed, either manually or with RENAME-PACKAGE
hacks to de-conflict the nicknames.


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue			<URL:http://rpw3.org/>
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