Best practice for dub registry package and module names

[Adam D Ruppe]

On Sunday, 4 September 2022 at 03:50:56 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> For example, there is fixedsizearray, which does not belong to 
> any package:

Yeah, this is bad design since two separate people might reuse 
the name and then end users - even if it comes through a couple 
layers of dependencies they didn't even know about - can see 
conflicts when they try to link the program.

You really need globally unique D names.

> On the other hand, arsd-official:minigui does have a package. 
> (And that answers a question: Dash character is acceptable in 
> package and module names.)

dub allows dash. D does not. The dub name and the D name do not 
have to match (I personally consider this yet another design flaw 
in dub, but it is what it is).

The reason mine is called "arsd-official" on dub is because 
someone else registered "arsd" before me, but they didn't keep up 
with changes, so I had to do it myself but the name was already 
taken.

But remember, the dub package name and the D package/module names 
are completely separate. D knows absolutely nothing about dub and 
dub knows very little about D. You should have them match when 
you can for user convenience, but it doesn't actually check it.

> How does that work? When the following dependency added to a 
> user's project,
>
>   "arsd-official:minigui": "~>10.9.1"
>
> does dub pull the entirety of arsd-official and then use 
> minigui module from it?

Yes, dub always pulls its top level thing in full. Then I had to 
specify a long list of subpackages in dub.json to let it 
understand the independent modules.

Dub is unbelievably and embarrassingly bad. It really is a 
disappointment, but you can make it somewhat work if you repeat 
yourself enough times. Downloading a few extra kilobytes of D 
code is the least of its problems.