Hey,
I am probably missing something here, because ... isn't switching from
“User” to “\User” pointless?
I am not suggesting doing this. What started this discussion is me having a class called Site in the namespace MW. So it's MW\Site rather then MWSite. (Unless you want to go with just Site and be fucked whenever some other package just dumping stuff in the top level NS happens to have such a class as well. Unlikely you say? I remember us having to rename some classes just for this reason (where PHP itself was the other package).)
At least it leaves core in a inconsistent state.
It's inconsistent now. Sure everything is in the top level NS, but we're using different prefix schemes at different places. We have classes prefixed with MW and we have those without this prefix. In this sense having a namespace is equivalent to a prefix. Introducing namespaces and migrating with full compat using aliases is a way to get rid of all the inconsistencies in the long run. Hmm... maybe I'm being naive here - not like "long term" arguments seem to have much weight when it comes to MW design.
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw http://www.bn2vs.com Don't panic. Don't be evil. --