Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> On 17/09/15 at 15:04 -0400, Robert Edmonds wrote:
> > Wookey wrote:
> > > +++ Raphael Hertzog [2015-09-17 14:41 +0200]:
> > > > Hi,
> > > >
> > > > On Thu, 17 Sep 2015, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
> > > > > Please check if I forgot something obvious or if there is some big
> > > > > error
> > > > > in it. Patches/git trees to merge from/... are welcome.
> > > >
> > > > Please don't call this feature "Bikesheds" and don't hardcode this
> > > > naming
> > > > in the suggested API. It was funny during one Debconf talk... but it
> > > > won't
> > > > be funny in the long term.
> > >
> > > It wasn't supposed to be a joke. Bikeshed is an appropriate name, in
> > > the unix tradition of mildly amusing/punny names.
> >
> > Which tradition would that be?
> >
> > Out of the few hundred or so Unix [0] and GNU [1] commands listed on
> > Wikipedia, the only vaguely amusing/punning names I can find are tac
> > ("cat" backwards) and pinky (a lightweight "finger").
>
> seriously?
> apt, aptitude, bash, bison (yacc replacement), curl, curses, flex, gawk,
> glut, grub, lame, less, mutt, sane, tar, vim are all project names that
> I find at least vaguely amusing.
Ah, OK, I was mostly thinking of names from the early Unix era. Puns
did certainly creep into the GNU and later eras, e.g., yacc -> bison,
more -> less -> most. I guess curses -> ncurses was a missed
opportunity.
Some names originally intended to be amusing have not stood the test of
time, though. E.g., "BitchX", "GIMP"...
> However we can probably find something more amusing and less loaded than
> 'Bikeshed' for the project being discussed.
Indeed, and it's interesting that you mention apt and aptitude. APT
originally had a somewhat unsettling name and after some debate a much
better name was agreed upon. In fact, re-reading those threads I see
some of the same arguments being made here. APT then went on to
arguably become even more popular than Debian itself.
--
Robert Edmonds
edmo...@debian.org
