[erlang-questions] Package Support/Use: Episode IV - A New Hope

[Ulf Wiger]

Den 2006-11-02 03:07:51 skrev Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED>:

> How fortunate you are to have no name clashes amongst Users!

Well, it sort of has to be resolved anyway, since you can only
call modules that belong to registered users(*), and in order to
register, you have to pick a unique alias.

(*) and normal modules known to be safe.


> What this means in practice of course is that the names used in
> the dotted module names (for which erlhive_User_Module would have
> been every bit as good) have to be managed by erlhive and cannot be
> freely chosen by users.

They can freely choose whatever comes after 'erlhive.User.'
Sure, I could have used erlhive_User_Module instead, but I
fail to see the point of inventing my own way of denoting a
structured module name, when there is already support in
Erlang (albeit experimental) for this.

> In fact, you might as well maintain a
> data base mapping users to surrogates (as in William Kent's
> "Data and Reality") and the surrogates might as well be 7
> base-36 digits assigned at random.  (Enough to give everyone
> on the planet 13 surrogates.)

I could have done this too, but personally don't see it as an
improvement over the scheme I chose.

(From your other mail):

> The forgery problem is that nothing actually stops anyone using any
> module name they like.

But in my case, I solve that by disallowing attempts to do this.
(Hopefully, I'm pretty sure it's not possible to do this in erlhive.)

BR,
Ulf W
-- 
Ulf Wiger