[Kde-bindings] PerlQt4's namespaces

[Chris Burel]

A while ago there was a debate about what to name the new Qt module.
There were concerns raised about getting ownership of the Qt namespace
in CPAN, as well as the namespace collision that would happen if
someone wanted to have both the PerlQt3 module and the PerlQt4 module
installed at the same time.  We did end up getting the CPAN namespace
ownership (thanks Ashley!), but the latter concern led to the decision
of naming the module Qt4.  Initially, I wanted to just rename the
module, so you'd say 'use Qt4;' in the code, but the module would
still populate the Qt namespace, so you'd have 'my $widget =
Qt::Widget()'.  This wouldn't cause a runtime namespace collision,
because while people may want to have both Qt3 and Qt4 Perl modules
installed, they wouldn't be using both in the same application.  But
there was concern about possible confusion between the name of the
module and the namespace that it populates, so the decision was to
keep the module name in sync with it's namespace.  So you'd have 'use
Qt4; my $app = Qt4::Application(); my $widget = Qt4::Widget()'.

But now that the Smoke library is broken up, we're faced with breaking
up the bindings into multiple Perl modules as well.  Presumably, these
could be called either 'QtCore' and 'QtGui', or to be forward-looking,
called 'QtCore4' and 'QtGui4'.  Keeping in line with the decision made
earlier about keeping the module name in sync with the namespace it
populates, that would mean your code now looks like this:
use QtCore4;
use QtGui4;
my $app = QtGui4::Application(...);
my $widget = QtGui4::Widget(...);
# and, for example
my $variant = QtCore4::Variant(...);

This seems really horrid to me, because now we're requiring the users
of the bindings to know what module a given type comes from, and would
get much worse once bindings to the KDE libs are complete, because
there are much more of them.  To me, it seems like the best way to
move forward is to reverse the decision made to keep the module name
and namespace the same.  The modules would still be called QtGui4 and
QtCore4, but would all populate a namespace named simply 'Qt'.  This
seems like the cleanest solution.