Re: Document that symbol prefix "my-" (or other) should be left for users

[Tassilo Horn]

John Wiegley <address@hidden> writes:

>> I have had zero problems but it's also near-zero effort to decide a
>> prefix, document it and obey it. And yes, it's for avoiding name
>> conflicts: so that user's configuration won't harm future Emacs
>> functionality, nor the other way around.
>
>> But it's just a suggestion. I'm not going to have a month long
>> discussion about this. So just ignore it. :-)
>
> I appreciate the effort, Teemu, but I don't think it needs explicit
> documentation. The only package that could conceivably use "my-" as a
> prefix would have to be called "my", otherwise it's in violation of
> other Emacs coding standards.

There are some packages which have a long name and then use a short
abbreviation for (parts of) their functions and variables.  For example,
the `ace-window' package defines functions and variables with the
prefixes ace-* and aw-* (the latter mostly for "private" stuff).  At
least the aw-* symbols could easily clash with Anton Wiegley's private
stuff.

I just picked `ace-window' from the top of my head.  I'm pretty sure
there are more packages which use some abbreviation of their name as
prefix.

Despite clashes, such abbreviations make those packages also less
discoverable using the normal auto-completion features C-h f/v.

Bye,
Tassilo