FWIW, right after the 667 comment (although one suspects that it's really a devilish 666 point 666 rounded up), I was going to say, I thought I understood this issue and then I didn't.

My intuition was, why doesn't this just trigger a warning?  Scalac knows where it's loading packages from.

My other thought was, it's 2013 (right?) and this is an issue?

I haven't thought about it again (because I'm lame), but: does this mean that someday I'm going to be experimenting with a local version of ... Enumeration! no wait, xml.Node! ... and I'll suddenly get a weird error that will waste half an hour because of some stupid directory?  I say "waste" but I mean "learning experience."

You know I put all my tmp scala stuff in just a couple of dirs, one is called scala, the other is called util.  Both are on my CLASSPATH!  

What about -Yignore-phantom-packages?  or -Xlint?  or -Xnoob?

I thought option 1 was policy; couldn't scalac enforce option 2?  If I'm in the scala hierarchy, obviously I can't opt-out of scala.

Define use of "relative" packages.

Maybe import scala.language.relativePackages.

Footnote: I noticed recently that the language feature names are all plural, whereas there was soul-searching over pluralized package names like macros.

I was in line to lgtm, but that's presumptuous when one is more confused than one's future-self.