Re: library prefixes (versus other name prefixes)

[Adam Porter <adam@alphapapa.net>]

If I may offer a perspective from "MELPA land" (though I am not MELPA,
just a contributor):

MELPA has not always required that submitted packages strictly adhere to
the Elisp manual's conventions, so some older packages do use a slash as
a prefix separator.

New packages are frequently submitted which use a slash separator.  Now,
MELPA requires them to replace the slash with a hyphen, as the Elisp
manual recommends.  Sometimes the package authors are very reluctant to
do so.

Some built-in Emacs packages also use a slash separator, like pcomplete
(although it seems to use it only for generated completion functions,
not library functions).

Some MELPA packages also use a colon as a separator, like Hydra
(although, like pcomplete, it seems to use it only for generated Hydra
functions).

In my own non-MELPA code, I use a slash separator.  For me, it's more
visually distinctive than a hyphen and makes it easier to discern the
prefix part of the symbol.

So, I would be glad if the official Elisp conventions allowed a slash
separator, and I think many other Elisp package authors would as well.

This topic frequently comes up in discussion on reddit.com/r/emacs,
which is read by many users and package authors, so I've linked this
thread there:

https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/gcrwic/the_symbolprefixseparatormustbeahyphen_topic/