Package Namespaces

[nz366]

Using namespaces in packages is a very useful feature. It allows different variations of similarly named/ same package to coexist. This way brioche will follow GitHub's structure where individuals and organizations can make changes to the same program for different use-cases.

[kylewlacy]

Makes sense! I definitely want to support namespaces, and it's definitely useful for name conflicts and alternate implementations

I personally still believe that having a top-level namespace is a good idea for a package manager, but one that is more managed / curated-- basically the model that Docker Hub uses. I think it's useful to have curl as a top-level package since it's an extremely popular project, and it's going to be unambiguous what someone wants if they say brioche run -r curl. (For things like GitHub, you end up seeing things like curl/curl otherwise for many major projects)

Eventually, I'm hoping there can be an integration between Brioche and Repology (see brioche-dev/brioche-packages#368). In a world with both namespaces and top-level packages, we might even be able to use that to guide which packages should be top-level and which should be in a namespace-- something like "do more than [some number] of package repositories have this package already with a top-level name?"

[nz366]

Yeah, top-level namespace is fine as long as users can direct brioche to use namespaces just by adding a prefix like the following.
brioche run -r rusty.curl