Re: [Monotone-devel] namespace-ifying attrs

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 08:17:23PM +0100, Jon Bright wrote:
> Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> >This is similar to how we reserve "MT" and ".mt-*" in the monotone
> >working copy namespace for our own use; we would reserve "mtn:" for
> >our own use in the attr namespace.
> 
> Potential enhancement: anything without a colon is automatically 
> prefixed with "mtn:"

Hmm, so roughly, reserve the chunk of the namespace that is
"everything without a colon", and tell other people that they can
define any custom attr they want, just they must ensure it contains a
colon?

This seems a little tricky from the point of view of making correct
behavior also the most natural... if all the attrs that people see are
just bare words, I doubt many will think to prepend a special prefix
when inventing their own.  On the other hand, if the normal ones say
"mtn:" at the front, the question of "hrm, what should I put before
the colon?" immediately jumps to mind?

> >Counter-objections:
> >  -- better safe than sorry; we don't know whether there will be an
> >     explosion of custom attrs or not.
> 
> If this is done, I have the feeling that (IETF-style), there should be 
> some defined scheme for other people to define their attributes.  That 
> said, the only one that springs to mind is something like 
> com.siliconcircus:foo, which is... icky.  Maybe this is unnecessary.

I don't think domains can have colons in them, so you could just use
siliconcircus.com:foo, if you wanted :-).

But yeah, let's not invent a bureaucracy "just in case"!

-- Nathaniel

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