Common LISP Registrar

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>]

I think that the lack of response to your offer to be the Common Lisp
name registrar is because the problem that that would solve doesn't
exist yet.  So far, we've had no trouble at CMU with conflicting package
names in our system or in our code libarary, and we don't use the #+
stuff at all.  If we wanted to import something into our library from
outside and there was a name conflict, it seems to me that the quickest
and easiest solution would be for the library maintainers to fix the
problem in some locally appropriate way.  Right now, I think that
name-conflict resolution is just a natural part of library maintenance.

I suppose that someday there will be a lot of commerce in Common Lisp
software, and it will benefit the customers that the various big AI
packages and various public and proprietary libraries all respect one
another's conventions.  In that future time, it will be necessary to
have some official registrar.  It will also be important that there be
some agreed-upon mechanism for resolving disputes over these names.  Do
we give a nice package/feature name like GRAPHICS to the first outfit
that asks for it (setting off a gold rush to grab all the good names for
future use, much as some companies are now trying to trademark every
English word and a lot of otherwise-useful numbers), or do we try to
assign a name like GRAPHICS to whatever is the most widely used graphics
package around at the time, or do we say that only names like
DEC-GRAPHICS will be registered if the root name is too generic?

-- Scott