[ocaml-platform] Followup to Leo's proposal

[Yaron Minsky]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 5:55 AM, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil at recoil.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 09:51:59PM -0400, Yaron Minsky wrote:
>> - TRUSTING NAMESPACES.  When thinking about whether files should be
>>   able to declare their namespaces, one thing that's worth considering
>>   is the notion of trust.  The Core library is a particularly closely
>>   code-reviewed and tested collection of code, and one can feel pretty
>>   safe that if you use anything inside of Core.Std, you're using a
>>   pretty trustworthy piece of code.
>>
>>   On the other hand, Core_extended.Std is less closely reviewed, and
>>   I would want to avoid it for many trusted applications.  Within Jane
>>   Street, this is easy for us to manage: we have clear control at the
>>   build-system level of what goes into Core.Std, and we can enforce
>>   standards of testing and code review on it.
>
> I agree with Jeff here.  You can still maintain this guarantee at the
> build system level, and it cripples namespaces if I *cant* extend them in
> ways that the original library author didn't want (for example, by
> injecting a new module).  This is, after all, what Core does by shadowing
> most of the Pervasives module.

I wasn't meaning to make an argument against Leo's design here.  I
just wanted to raise an issue about namespaces which other people may
not have considered.  As long as the proposal allows us to from the
build system enforce rules on what gets into a namespace, I'm happy.

y