[Soaplite-devel] SOAP-Lite namespace issues

[Martin K. <mar...@fe...>]

Hi,

I'm getting more and more mails complainin about unresolved namespace
issues in SOAP-Lite.

The name causing most current problems is SOAP::Packager - a equally
named (but older) module is included in the SOAP Distribution.

The result of the namespace conflict is, that SOAP::Lite is not
installable via cpan (or perl -MCPAN -e shell). This adds quite a
barrier to many perl users.

I'd suggest we concentrate on resolving the namespace issues, and put
out a modified version as "0.8" as fast as possible. We haven't reached
1.0 yet, so it's certainly not a new major release - but maybe the
larger gap warns users a bit, and I'll certainly drop a note in the
readme.

Besides moving everything without a need to stay in the SOAP namespace
(the stuff from "Programming Web-Services with Perl" should stay, as
moving it would make large parts of the book unusable), conflicting
modules should be moved into SOAP/Lite.pm. This way, they are not
regarded as conflict by the CPAN indexer.

As moving / renaming stuff is likely to break things, I'd like to
provide most packages with both the old and the new name. The old-named
ones should issue a warning when used.

What's desperately needed is tests: We just cannot be sure we don't
break SOAP::Lite internally without tests, so I'll devote my energy to
improving the test suite first.

Any support is welcome ;-)

Martin