Discuss name collision possibilities when we replace "/" with "." in namespaces

[nellshamrell]

Background

In order to request a maven package, the API call would look like this:

curl -X GET https://clearlydefined.io/definitions/maven/mavencentral/com.apollographql.apollo3/apollo-runtime-jvm/3.0.0-dev14" -H "accept: */*"

In this case, the coordinates are maven/mavencentral/com.apollographql.apollo3/apollo-runtime-jvm/3.0.0-dev14

Let's break this down:

• maven is the type
• mavencentral is the provider
• com.apollographql.apollo3 is the namespace
• apollo-runtime-jvm is the name
• 3.0.0-dev14 is the revision

When we run this API call:

curl -X GET https://clearlydefined.io/definitions/maven/mavencentral/com.apollographql.apollo3/apollo-runtime-jvm/3.0.0-dev14" -H "accept: */*"

It harvests the component from here.

Notice something in the url - the namespace is "com/apollographql/apollo3" - there are a lot of slashes in there.

The way we translate this namespace into coordinates is to replace the slashes in the namespace with periods.

So "com/apollographql/apollo3" becomes "com.apollographql.apollo3".

We do the same thing with git components that come from gitlab and will need to do the same with Go components (see #862 for more details).

Potential problem

It's unlikely, but it's possible we could run into name collisions by using this technique. For example - these two paths for two different go components would map to the same set of coordinates.

github.com/user/repo/pkg -> ["github.com.user.repo", "pkg"]
github.com/user.repo/pkg -> ["github.com.user.repo", "pkg"]