Package Namespaces and Collisions

The cluster centers on discussions about the importance of namespaces in package managers and registries like npm and PyPI to prevent naming conflicts and collisions between packages.

📉 Falling 0.4x Programming Languages
3,009
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#2821
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
5
2008
28
2009
57
2010
60
2011
108
2012
133
2013
123
2014
169
2015
130
2016
186
2017
157
2018
131
2019
159
2020
257
2021
221
2022
242
2023
371
2024
210
2025
248
2026
16

Keywords

NPM GUID PHP DNS CSS JS CompilerException IllegalArgumentException example.com OOP namespaces namespace packages package convention naming java collisions npm modules

Sample Comments

ssmoot Dec 2, 2014 View on HN

What's wrong with namespaces in your opinion?

kyled May 6, 2017 View on HN

Namespaces solves this issue, no?

howeman Jan 12, 2014 View on HN

Packages aren't enough of a namespace differentiator for you?

k8svet Feb 24, 2024 View on HN

"Don't have colliding fundamentally different namespaces" is not really a hard problem to resolve in this case, though.

56KBs Oct 1, 2019 View on HN

Kudos to them for being so open. However to avoid issues of this class would namespacing package names not help?

krispyfi May 13, 2025 View on HN

Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

wmf Oct 30, 2008 View on HN

Flat centralized namespaces are bad; creating new ones is worse.

vbezhenar Mar 3, 2021 View on HN

I thought namespaces issue was solved in Java decades ago with domain names? Why invent anything?

knolax Nov 18, 2020 View on HN

I don't wanna be that guy but can we stop with all the namespace conflicts.

kibwen Sep 12, 2020 View on HN

Once you introduce namespaces, now you have naming disputes about the namespaces themselves.