3PD extensions have no way of adding entries into the extensions mapper file

It's meant for core extensions, according to the comment inside it.

Why not just leave components/com_content/helpers/route.php and have it extend the namespaced class. Like in com_contact. Deprecate the old classes for 5.0. The "lowercase folders in core with classes" question is hardly an issue, IMO.

Why do 3PD extensions need to add entries to the mapper file? This is only because ContentHelper is used widely in the eco system so it would crash many extensions. To be fair here, we did it only for good will as we do not have to keep BC for core extensions or I'm wrong?

It's not about people using the ContentRouter file. That's fine as it is I think. There's a class alias anyhow.

But other 3rd party components will have their own router helper files probably and I don't see many places where this components/3rd party modules are different to other extensions (e.g. virtuemart or any component with a 3rd party module ecosystem etc).

Shouldn't 3rd party components register the route helper while component booting or in a plugin?

Well not when the components booting because you don’t wanna boot the component for smart search for example. But the auto loader doesn’t depend on that anyway.

I guess it can be loaded by the auto loader as things are. The point is any 3rd party stuff integrating won’t have the luxury of a class alias which I guess isn’t so disastrous. But certainly isn’t optimal either.

Doesn't the autoloader is able to load Component<componentname>\Site\Helper\RouteHelper automatically?

We really shouldnt be treating extensions any differently to core components. If extensions have limitations then it really defeats the point of creating an extendable system

So, 1.5 years later little has changed here. My personal oppinion is, that there is no need to change what we have right now. The alias is only there for convenience right now and we will drop that in 5.0 anyway. I would rather look at coming up with an improved component concept then, than working on this now further. Can we close this issue here?

Well there's no point in working on it for J5. The point is if 3rd party extensions move to our "recommended" namespaced map then they have a hard b/c break with any extensions using their router helpers when they namespace

should be moved to ´discussion´

ok i'll move it to discussion