Both LinearAlgebra and LinearAlgebra.BLAS export dot

[ararslan]

This is quite annoying:

julia> using LinearAlgebra

julia> using LinearAlgebra.BLAS

julia> dot
WARNING: both BLAS and LinearAlgebra export "dot"; uses of it in module Main must be qualified
ERROR: UndefVarError: dot not defined

It seems like BLAS should either extend dot from LinearAlgebra or not export its own dot.

[andreasnoack]

Should we consider not exporting anything from BLAS such that you always fully quality uses of BLAS functions?

[ararslan]

I really like being able to do using LinearAlgebra.BLAS and having access to gemm, syrk, etc. unqualified. Removing all exports seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water given that the only name clash is one function.

[StefanKarpinski]

Let's just unexport the controversial one instead of making this more of a decision.

[musm]

Is it really necessary to make a change here? The BLAS library is a low level wrapper, which, presumably, mainly library writers are calling and if not, it seems like it would be better to just directly import the BLAS functions you want instead?

I do think either keeping the exports or unexporting them all makes the most sense, and is a consistent decision.

[ararslan]

The way I see it is, if you're saying using LinearAlgebra.BLAS, you're explicitly asking for access to the BLAS names. Doing that in general is unlikely to be all that common, but when it is, it's immensely useful. I've run into that multiple times in the past couple of weeks. It quickly becomes really annoying to not be able to use dot. It doesn't make sense to me to say "you can't have exports because this is a low-level wrapper."