Namespacing Pinax Packages

For most Pinax packages, we have begun namespacing under pinax.*, and will continue to do so by default.

The more we build apps, the more difficulty we have faced in naming things. We want to name things in ways that are easy to derive meaning from while not conflicting with other packages.

Namespacing gives us the freedom to name things simply and understandably.

For example, Eldarion donated biblion to Pinax as pinax-blog while the package was renamed from biblion to pinax.blog.

As you can see, there are two namespacing problems being addressed here. One is the PyPI namespace (pinax-blog) and the other is the namespacing of the Python packages (pinax.blog). In the past Eldarion solved both of these problems by chosing Greek names.

With a name like biblion time must be invested in marketing the name of the app so people know what it means, but to use just blog is sure to have conflicts with other packages, not to mention just PyPI package name availability.

Furthermore, it allows the idea of the Pinax ecosystem to be represented more explicitly when apps are sharing the same namespace. However, apps in the Pinax ecosystem are just Django apps and can be used independently.