Handling modules with same name (from library and from current project)

[Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de>]

Hello Guile Users!

I have a question regarding an issue I run into again and again, and have not 
found an adequate solution for yet. I want to know how you are handling this, 
what your solution is.

(1) recent story:

I have a website, that I wrote manually in pure HTML and CSS. It does what it 
should and there is no actual issue with it. However, I have been thinking it 
would be cool to implement it in Guile and make a sort of minimal example or web 
"framework", of how one can make such a static website using Guile. I already 
have some example in my examples repository. However, that example has code in 
it, that is copied from my existing "guile-fslib", which is on guix already. So 
I have been thinking: "I should just install the package from guix and remove 
this code from my new website repository, having it hidden away in the 
guile-fslib library." It is just some code to work with file names and 
directories and paths, not directly web related, but important for checking, 
whether a request for a static resource/an asset is within the "static" 
directory, and not just anywhere on the server, which would be a security issue.

Of course I could put everything in a docker container or something, or 
completely serve static assets using a HTTP server, as one should, but then the 
Guile thing I want to build would not work on its own. I want to at least have 
it implemented as a fallback, so that one could run it without an additional 
thing in front of it for handling static resource requests.

(2) So far so good. But now comes the problem:

"guile-fslib" has a module named "string-utils" and a module named "list-utils". 
In my guile web development example code I also have modules with those names. 
Guile then gets confused about which one I am referring to, when I `(use-modules 
...)` them and in the code that makes use of the functions from those modules, 
it then claims, that no bindings with some name exist, because it has looked 
into the "list-utils" or "string-utils" of the guix package, instead of the one 
of my web project.

(3) Thoughts:

I don't know how to resolve this. I think it is very unreasonable to have to 
look out to name no module the same name as any module in any library I am 
using. Obviously many libraries or projects will have some list utilities or 
helpers for convenience. Many projects will have some special string functions. 
Having a name like "string-utils" or "string-helpers" should not be an 
impossibility.

 From a past/previous case of this, I remember someone saying I should get my 
load path in order. But what does this mean? In my projects I invoke Guile doing 
something like this:

~~~~
guile -L . -L libs main.scm
~~~~

I simply use the `-L` argument to pass in all the directories, in which my 
modules reside, for example "libs/list-utils.scm" or "libs/string-utils.scm", 
which I then import into various other modules and the main file, the entrypoint.

(4) Solution ideas:

(4.1) I already abstain from doing `(add-to-load-path ...)` manipulations in my 
code. As far as I know I am not doing anything dirty there. But ... Guile gets 
confused about which module to import and it seems to see the one from installed 
library first and then not consider the one of my current project. I am not even 
sure how Guile could possibly know which module I am referring to, because I am 
not telling it anything about that. So I am wondering, whether some dark magic 
of dynamically changing load path is perhaps a _necessary_ evil?

(4.2) Or perhaps I have to give my modules multi part names like `(define-module 
(fslib helpers list-utils))` to scope module names? But that would be annoying 
when using them inside the library itself, because it is more to write and I am 
not sure others are doing that always. Usually I just name my modules 
`(list-utils)` or `(string-utils)`. Is that a bad thing, when these are modules 
of helper functions, which are not supposed to be exported for use in other 
projects?

(4.3) The ugly solution I so far had to reach for, because I couldn't figure out 
a better way: Integrate library code directly into the source tree of a project, 
copying code. This cannot be the right way to do it, can it? Seems unlikely.

How do you manage this? I know people have written much bigger projects than I 
have and surely someone has some dependency on another Guile library. How do you 
avoid these module name conflicts? How do you make sure that only libraries 
themselves use their own helper function modules?

The bad thing is, that I always run into this, when I actually want to do 
something else. In this case build a website thing in Guile. But now I am side 
tracked again by this issue, because I don't know how to do this properly.

Best regards,
Zelphir

-- 
repositories:https://notabug.org/ZelphirKaltstahl,https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl