I've been working with Ruby for 20 years, and I've not needed something like this. This feels like adding a lot of complexity for little practical benefit. The trade-off feels off. I don't think this is worth the additional complexity.
Follow gem naming conventions and this is a non-issue -- both FooBar::Record and BazQux::Record can coexist for foo_bar and baz_qux gems, respectively. If a gem is defining other top-level constants outside of their gem module, then that's considered against convention, i.e. bad practice, and the language should not be modified to allow such a thing.
I'd like to hear of a real use case for namespaces that existing conventions don't already solve.
This is not the Ruby ethos.
And why would you bother doing that when it would be a breaking change?
Similarly, if you want to group modules that don't conflict together under a short module name, nothing stops you from doing:
module MyGroup
include Module1
include Module2
...
end
Using `include` of specific functionality into a class that will use it is furthermore an idiomatic way of avoiding that extra typing without polluting the global namespace
For that matter, you can often achieve close to what you're arguing for as well without actually making any changes to Ruby:
def wrap_load(path) = class_eval(File.read(path), path)
module Test
# some_file.rb will act as-if defined within Test
wrap_load("./some_file.rb")
end
Overall, I think the fact you can do these things suggests you could probably write a good enough plug-in `require` monkeypatch suitable for the rare cases where `include` from within a class or module without needing a language extension.
>First, I'm not convinced by the motivations:
>
>Avoiding name conflicts between libraries: Applications can require two different libraries safely which use the same module name.
>
>Is this a problem that happens on a regular basis? I believe Ruby has a pretty well established convention for libraries to expose a single module with a name that correspond to their gem name.
I really don't think we want to make it easier for newbies to alter gem naming conventions and run multiple versions of a gem within the same project, this sounds like a genuine nightmare to me. I've found from jumping in to fix broken and crippled rails projects for startups that the fuckup surface area is already high enough.