[Pre-RFC] DNS domains as package namespaces

jmillikin:

I'm not sure I follow, sorry, though that might be because I'm used to the left-to-right order used by other package managers, Rust mod hierarchy, XML namespaces, and so on. Every sort of scoping/namespacing system I know of is big-endian.

If you were looking at a group of dependencies, wouldn't you normally want them ordered as (namespace, name) instead of (name, namespace)?

I agree that this is the way namespaces are typically handled; however, in the case where the semantic name of the crate is xml and the "namespace" is just a disambiguating tag. There is no important relationship between example.com/xml and example.com/http for any purposes except a dependency audit to view your attack surface for supply chain vulnerabilities. (But in that case you want to group by crates.io owner, not by domain name space.)

By contrast, xml and example.com/xml are very closely related: they're two crates doing the same thing! Similarly http and example.com/http. It seems to me that in most lists, it makes more sense for example.com/xml to appear with xml and example.com/http to appear with http, which is the claim I was making.