On Sunday, 10. June 2007, Angela Byron wrote:
New thread, so we don't swamp poor Jakob's. :) Let's get consensus here and then update the coding standards.
I doubt if coding standards are going to work here at all. The difficulty with this is that module names have to be decided at the very beginning of the project (or at least, before the first commit), and after that you cannot change the name anymore. At least not without being backed by some seriously influential admins like Derek or Andy ;) A lot of modules is contributed by newcomers to the Drupal scene, and they need some time to get used to all the conventions and standards. If you look at the code of newly committed modules, in many cases it doesn't adhere to coding standards at all. That's not so much of a problem as you can still fix it afterwards, but with the short name of a module, you can't. (Blame CVS, harhar.) Also, we roughly got a 50/50 situation with respect to modules that are separated or not separated by underscores when it would possibly be appropriate. They'd seriously undermine the consistency if it's decided to come up with a standard here. In short, I'm not yet convinced that it's a good idea to include stuff like this into the guidelines. Personally, I think the version without underscore looks way more slick and accessible than if you split the words, but if something is decided here, I'd of course go with that.
The module name and the prefix will always match, except in the case where an underscore prefixes a function name, but again, that problem surfaces for both _mymodule_func and mymodule_func.
Relying on the module name to NOT have underscores in it seems brittle and error-prone to me. There are underscores-o-plenty in http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/, regardless of what we actually decide the standard should be. :) If that means we need to make our utility functions more intelligent, then we should probably do that.
Agreed.