Re: Why :USE sucks in the Common Lisp package system

[Daniel Colascione]

On 5/9/20 2:55 PM, Michał "phoe" Herda wrote:
> Thanks for the welcome.
>
> On 09.05.2020 23:47, João Távora wrote:
> > But don't _you_ ever use :USE it for packages that you _do_ have
> > control over?  Like an internal utils package?  Or a test package
> > that uses the package under testing?  Otherwise I agree with you
> > about the ":USE abuse".
>
> Of course I do! I've mentioned in my earlier mail,
>
>  > or a combination of packages that do not change and we have full 
> control over so we can manually see and resolve the symbol conflicts as 
> they arise
>
> Perhaps that wasn't clear enough from me: I meant that it is fine to 
> :USE packages that are known to not change and to :USE packages that we 
> fully control, such as internal util packages that you mention; and it 
> is fine to combine using the two within a single package.

It's just as easy to use local nicknames here though. I still haven't 
seen a compelling case for :use that outweighs the risk of imprudent 
use. Why is prefix-less import of some internal utils package so 
important?  If the utils package and the user of the utils package have 
the same author, they can just share a namespace instead of one using 
the other.