Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Everyone complains that 'fuse' is taken so they have to use something with qualifiers (e.g. rust-fuse), and then they propose to fix this with a solution that requires that everyone uses qualifiers for everything.

It's a bit more consistent in that no-one gets good names, but is it really such a problem that a few people happened to get in early enough that they could call their library 'fuse'?



I'm fine with qualifiers, but I don't want useless qualifiers.

"rust-" or "-rs" is useless because it's on crates.io. "lib" or "-lib" similarly, unless it's part of a pair with a binary of the same name.

Here's a partial list of FUSE server implementations on crates.io:

  * fuse
  * cntr-fuse
  * drakey-fuse
  * fuse_mt
  * fuser
  * fuse-rs
  * polyfuse
  * fuse3
  * yarf
Why do we make people come up with custom prefixes or opaque codenames when they could all be ~user/fuse ?


Why not user-fuse?


Names can be powerful. Owning a name like "fuse" implies that this is the thing called "fuse".

A flat "top level" namespace encourages treating names, especially short names, as something with intrinsic value. You end up with the same problems that the .com namespace has, such as name squatting and first mover advantage.

Qualifying all names removes this property from names and levels the playing field. There's no value in "owning" github.com/somename/blah. Or, to take the NPM approach, @somename/blah.


But then everyone just wants @fuse/fuse rather than fuse. If one project is @fuse/fuse and the other is @atombender/fuse, the first is going to have more legitimacy, just as if they were called fuse and atombender-fuse.


In reality, that does not seem to have happened, because the top-level is your name, and people have a different relationship to their own "branding", for the most part. People/companies also usually have more than one package.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: