NDN-CCL

Semver: "Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything may change at any time. The public API should not be considered stable."

As this has not (officially) been pushed to NPM yet, I assume most code is under control by the NDN project somehow? So a half-manual search-and-replace (e.g. renaming toUri to toPath) would be feasible and not too much work.

Boolean arguments for functions are considered harmful (yes, in theory allowed, but in practice please tell me what name.toUri() does differently from name.toUri(true) without looking at either its source code nor its documentation). There is a famous (and I think humorous) article about this topic, but I can't think of a term to throw into Google right now to look it up.

To summarize in maybe more coherent terms, this is my proposal:

• Rename toUri to toPath and all references to it while backwards-compatibility is not yet a (bigger) issue.

• Change toUri to return a valid URI.

The toUri method is used not just be the JavaScript library, but the C++, Python and Java libraries. And toUri is also used in ndn-cxx so that NFD can print routing prefixes, etc. (where you don't want to see "ndn:").

This would be a big across-the-board change which affects the whole community and a lot of existing code in many languages. If you feel strongly, this is large enough that I would suggest you send an email to ndn-lib to bring the issue to the community.

... or we can add an extra default parameter to toUri.

I would be favorable to the idea that we should introduce toPath and deprecate toUri. (We can also add something like toNdnUri which includes the "ndn:".) It is still a big enough change that I think we should discuss with the community on ndn-lib. I say this because a major design goal of the common client libraries is stability of the API, even if we are in alpha mode.