Re: ITP: water -- A graphical water effect demo.

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Hamish Moffatt <hamish@debian.org> writes:
> I disagree. The policy is to avoid namespace polution, which means
> that package names should be as specific as possible.  Imagine if
> the first 26 packages were named a through z, just because they
> could be and they were first come first served?

I wrote:

> > If it were a word that referred to common activity, then it might be
> > considered too generic, but it's not.

The point being that there has to be *some* point at which you stop
trying to be more specific in a package name, and when a name is
unlikely to cause conflict in the future, the maintainer has more
freedom in choosing that point.

If the program is called `water' then it's perfectly fine to call the
package `water'.

[The suggested alternative `sdlwater' is completely wrong, since it
 simply adds an arbitrary implementation detail to the name -- something
 which may be useful in *disambiguating* a package when there are
 conflicts and no better disambiguating features, but which is
 pointlessly specific in this case, where there are no conflicts!]

-Miles