Package Aliases

[Eric Bresie]

I’m not sure if this is viable or valuable but thought I would ask the experts.

With the recent discussion on sun namespaces regarding “JEP: 408: Simple Web Server” this got me wondering if it’s worth the concept of a package namespace “alias” or link to another to another package to ease migration when changing package names.

The use case would mainly be when for a given package, ownership or transition from one organization to another allowing a way to have a new package name.

Maybe add an “alias” keyword with an alternative name which would allow usage of either alias or real package name from external package usage.

Assuming there could be a risk of security concerns of having an alias to a malicious package name some that might also have to be considered.

With module naming, I’m not sure if this would sort of be possible in this context but thought I would put it out to see.

Eric Bresie
Ebresie at gmail.com (mailto:Ebresie at gmail.com)