In his latest post David Coallier asks the PHP community how they use namespaces (to be included in the upcoming PHP 5.3 release):

Quick and simple question to the community. Before asking it, I'd like to remind you that this is not a bashing contest nor a competition to say why you don't like the namespaces implementation. What I would like to ask you all today is, how do you use them? File structures, Directory Structures, Naming Conventions you use, or even, have you used them at all? Are you planning on using them? If yes, why? If no, why?

Comments on the post range from an idea of "libraries" of code out to complaints on the operator chosen and others pushing them aside and not using them at all.

For those that have been keeping up with the namespace debate in the PHP community lately (the issue was the operator that would be used), it seems that a decision has been made - the backslash ( ) is the character of choice.

From Lukas Smith's blog:

So today we had an IRC meeting to discuss namespaces in PHP. We came to a final decision replacing the current double colon separator with a backslash to solve ambiguity issues with the current syntax. So far there has not been much of a reaction on list, except for a post which mentioned concerns related to the fact that backslash is currently used for escaping, but which was quickly responded by Greg to point out that yes we were aware of this, but it is not an issue if you know how to use the backslash properly in double quote strings.

You can find out more about this implementation using the backslash on this entry in the PHP.net wiki (near the bottom of the page).