I think the goals for namespaces in Squeak should be two:
1. Given 2 independently developed systems, each introducing its own 
meaning for a new class name, a developer should be able to make them 
able to live together in the same image without changing the actual code 
for either. I think this is the real goal of scalable independent 
deployment.
2. If the two systems both introduce similar concepts with the same 
name,  system should facilitate their merging by the respective 
maintainers. This goal is meant to facilitate sharing code that is 
living (and I this is what Markus is talking about).

I think many namespace systems achieve goal 1 by having each developer 
invent his own namespace (possibly more than one). I think this is a bad 
decision in our context, because it makes it harder to achieve 2. So far 
we've compromised by emulating this mode using the prefix convention, 
but only selectively.

I think the effect of first class prefixes will be to make it more 
convenient to delay the design and implementation of a real solution to 
these goals. This may be a good or a bad thing, depending on how close 
we feel to having a solution.

Daniel Vainsencher


Markus Gaelli wrote:
> Maybe namespaces of VW helped to get seaside ported to VW at all, but 
> I'd prefer to have an ongoing desire to unify classes, which _are_ 
> intended to work the same.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Markus
>