[kibwen]

> Well, that just encouraged everyone to choose collapsible names. In retrospect, this didn't buy us much. Who cares about saving a few characters of typing?

This appears to be using evidence to prove the opposite conclusion; if everyone voluntarily chose to use shorter names, then it means that everyone cares about having shorter names. If there is a more substantial argument for why people have decided that the collapsing was mistake, I'd like to read it.

[gw]

I didn't choose the shorter names because i "care[d] about having shorter names", i did so defensively, because i figured if i chose `net.sekao/iglu`, someone else would choose `iglu/iglu` which would imply that theirs was the original or official version.

Another point i didn't mention is that maven was designed from the start to be decentralized; many companies run their own private maven repos, but also pull artifacts from maven central. Having group names reduces the chances of collisions between their private servers and a public maven server.

[kibwen]

That's a better rationale, although I don't think that really solves your stated problem; as an uninformed user I am still more likely to think that iglu/iglu is the more authoritative source there. Given this, any project that wants to authoritatively own its identifier should probably also register its own top-level namespace... which unfortunately brings us back around to where we started.

[gw]

It would at least be far less of an issue. I don't see anyone being confused that https://github.com/facebook/react is the official repo, and not https://github.com/react/react. It's the fact that a collapsed name is a shortcut that imbues it with this special stature. And i believe maven central doesn't even allow one-segment group names for new libraries, though clojars obviously does.