[dpdk-dev] DPDK namespace

[Thomas Monjalon]

DPDK is going to be more popular in Linux distributions.
It means people will have some DPDK files in their /usr/include
and some DPDK libraries on their system.

Let's imagine someone trying to compile an application which needs
rte_ethdev.h. He has to figure out that this "rte header" is provided
by the DPDK. Hopefully it will be explained on StackOverflow that RTE
stands for DPDK.
Then someone else will try to run a binary without having installed
the DPDK libraries. The linker will require libethdev.so (no prefix here).
StackOverflow will probably have another good answer (among wrong ones):
"Hey Sherlock Holmes, have you tried to install the DPDK library?"
Followed by an insight: "You know, the DPDK naming is weird..."
And we could continue the story with developers having some naming clash
because of some identifiers not prefixed at all.

The goal of this email is to get some feedback on how important it is
to fix the DPDK namespace.

If there is enough agreement that we should do something, I suggest to
introduce the "dpdk_" prefix slowly and live with both "rte_" and "dpdk_"
during some time.
We could start using the new prefix for the new APIs (example: crypto)
or when there is a significant API break (example: mempool).

Opinions welcome!