A few recent conversations has brought something I've been wondering back to the forefront. For plugins that can be cross-backend (let's say I have a formatter that works across 3 backends), how should they be namespaced?

This question touches on a bigger-picture concern I have. I wonder if our naming strategy is ready for a large amount of plugins/ecosystems. For instance, we don't namespace our subsystems. (Not an answer, just an observation)

"multi" might be a good namespacer

🫤

🤷‍♂️

`x`for xtremely many languages

or literally put the same backend in 3 locations?

That would be my current idea, but it feels very inelegant - buuuut maybe it's not, because if you're not using those multiple backends, you'd never know

and if you use all 3, doesn't really matter

Yeah, I was thinking of how we namespace things to experimental, we just have a register in multiple locations that links to the original rules

If we did that, would users expect activating

pants.backend.js.fmt.foobar

would also format toml files? (as a strawman)

backend_packages = [
    "pants.backend.cc.lint.myplugin",
     ...
    "pants.backend.javascript.lint.myplugin",
     ...
    "pants.backend.swift.lint.myplugin",
]

[myplugin-cc]
...
[myplugin-javascript]
...
[myplugin-swift]
...

or 
[myplugin]
swift.
cc.
javascript.

?