On Wed, 2024-07-24 at 19:51 +0200, Tim Düsterhus wrote: > Hi > > On 7/24/24 19:43, Nick Lockheart wrote: > > What is the general feeling about reserving a namespace for PHP's > > built > > in classes? > > see https://wiki.php.net/rfc/namespaces_in_bundled_extensions > > Best regards > Tim Düsterhus
Thank you. I've read through the RFC and see it was approved. Is it too late to comment on this? My concern is that placing things into new and arbitrary namespaces as per the RFC is just a different variation on the global name problem. The problem, as I see it, is that new names that come bundled with PHP can be arbitrary. If new bundled classes can have arbitrary dictionary words as the namespace, then we may actually have a bigger problem as no name space is safe from future collisions. The biggest problem with built-ins is that you can't unregister them. I think a better solution would be to have one namespace for all bundled classes, so that a specific namespace is reserved in advance. >From the RFC: > 3rd-party extensions clearly cannot start out under a PHP namespace, > as they have no direct relation to, endorsement by, or oversight of > the PHP project. If all symbols in bundled extensions are to be > prefixed by PHP, this would require a rename of all symbols when an > extension moves from 3rd-party to bundled. I think this is the real issue: How could we use a small number of reserved namespaces for built-ins, but deal with permanence of those names as things move around? What if we had a grandfather policy? Once a third party is accepted into core, it gets a core namespace. If it is later removed from core, it gets grandfathered into being allowed to use the core namespace, even if it is once again third party. The RFC did mention that once something moves to core, it seldom moves back out, if ever. There was a vote on something similar four years ago, 13(no)/17(yes), declined. It was four votes shy of passing: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php_namespace_policy There was more in that proposal though: the use of component namespaces in addition to just `\php`. Could this issue possibly be revisited and voted on with a more narrow scope? I think if we reserved `\php` and `\ext`, then there would be no need to have multi-level namespaces, like the prior RFC proposed. I think every standard class could just be `\spl\classname` without any naming conflicts between core classes. And that would also avoid future namespace collisions.
