[eclipse.org-architecture-council] Bundle and Java package naming

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

During today's architecture council meeting, I raised
the topic of management of the org.eclipse.* namespace of bundle and package
names. I just wanted to elaborate here so other architecture council members
who were unable to attend can comment. We generally follow the convention
that each project owns one or more "level three" namespaces (org.eclipse.<project>),
but as far as I can tell, there is no formal management of the allocation
of these names to projects. There is potential for confusion, or even runtime
problems, if plug-ins from multiple projects end up with the same names,
and the plug-ins end up being delivered together (for example in the Eclipse
release train, or in Eclipse-based products). Doug raised the example of
org.eclipse.pdt.*, which could mean Python tools, PHP tools, Perl tools,
etc. I regularly run across cases where projects are assuming ownership
of names other than org.eclipse.<theirOwnProjectName>.*.  Merely
by way of example, I saw this note today about a plug-in in ECF called
"org.eclipse.bittorrent":

http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/equinox-dev/msg03680.html

This one is not likely to collide with other projects,
but it illustrates that this does happen today. Other names, particularly
three letter acronyms (TLAs), have a higher potential for collision across
projects.  My question to the architecture council was: is there a
need for more management of bundle and package names, and can the architecture
council help in this area. For example, we could maintain a list of the
name allocations so that projects can see what is available. Should this
be managed by the EMO, possibly in consultation with the arch council?
Can we help by taking the Eclipse top-level project naming conventions
(http://wiki.eclipse.org/Naming_Conventions), and generalize them into
a set of conventions/guidelines for all Eclipse projects?

Thoughts, comments, flames?