Packages in Erlang: new documentation

[WILLIAMS Dominic]

> From: Richard Carlsson
> 
> Since the R9B release of Erlang, "packages" (hierarchical module
> namespaces) have been available for testing by the Erlang community.
> 
> It seems that the information about this, and how it works, has not
> reached enough people. I have therefore written a new piece of
> documentation about packages in Erlang, in the hope that it will
> be better understood, and more people will try it out:

I plead guilty to having tried them out without giving feedback! So,
here it is:

They worked, as far as I could tell. I found them quite intuitively
designed (I have used C++ namespaces and Java packages before).

There is just one problem, from my point of view: they force one to
import everything global (lists, io, etc.), or add a . in front of
these modules (I couldn't get import_all to work for the global
package). As I am sick of keeping track of #includes and imports, I
enjoyed this not being necessary in Erlang. And I did not much like
the look of code peppered with the . prefix (just a matter of taste).

So, I am not using them for the moment.

However, I have not written large volumes of Erlang code. Do
those people who have feel a need to have packages? You seem to have
survived without them so far!

Regards,

Dominic.