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Re: [Monotone-devel] renaming monotone executable (again)
From: |
Timothy Brownawell |
Subject: |
Re: [Monotone-devel] renaming monotone executable (again) |
Date: |
Sun, 26 Feb 2006 20:43:27 -0600 |
On Sun, 2006-02-26 at 04:15 -0800, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> Arguments against switching (attempting to summarize the points of the
> above thread):
> 1) A real word is a refreshing change from the usual cryptic Unix
> command names...
Bah. Cryptic means I don't have to type as much. ;)
> Response: Perhaps, but experience shows that the long name
> bothers lots of people enough to work around it. OTOH, I don't
> think even subversion, with its huge and increasingly less
> sophisticated user base, has had any requests to provide a
> command line executable named "subversion" instead of "svn".
> 2) A real word is more descriptive.
So "monotone" should be... what, a put-you-to-sleep text-to-speech
system? ;)
> Response: Err, well, except "monotone" is completely
> non-descriptive to most people already :-). And 'man monotone'
> or 'info monotone' or even 'monotone --help' already provide
> plenty of clue what this tool is.
>
> To symlink or not to symlink:
> It's been suggested that we should keep the current name, but
> provide a standard shorter symlink, or switch to a new name but keep
> the old name as a symlink. I don't really see the advantages of this,
> outside of a knee-jerk attempt at a compromise solution. We still
> have to pick one or the other to be the official name used in the
> documentation, etc.; making packages set up symlinks is a pain and has
> to be done for every packaging format; it doesn't work on windows
> anyway; and the experience from every other system, where this is all
> a complete non-issues, suggests that _no-one_ actually yearns to have
> a longer name available.
>
> What to switch to:
> -- "mt" is the most natural choice, but not available. Annoying,
> since no-one uses the old mt command anymore, but there you go.
> -- I'm kind of fond of "m" (take _that_, you upstart 2-letter
> systems like hg!), but it got shouted down the last time I
> suggested it :-).
> -- "mmm" -- less boring than other suggestions, has appropriate
> associations ;-), and is, in fact, a mono-tone... but just
> perhaps a bit too cute. Also, annoying to type.
> -- "moto" -- dunno, also has nice associations. That it's 4 letters
> is a bit unfortunate... maybe "mto" would be a compromise,
> keeping the short pronounciation...
> -- "mtn" -- the boring, generic choice. Of course, sometimes boring
> is good.
It's also what I use, so it's clearly superior. :p
>
> What next:
> This is a classic bike-shed issue, but we do have a deadline :-).
> It's either going to happen or not for 0.26. We pretty much need to
> decide whether it will happen or not, and what the final name will be.
> I lean towards "yes" and "mtn", so if no-one speaks up that will
> probably be what happens :-), but I'm not attached to that or
> anything. The "moto" suggestion is clever too, and I had forgotten
> about it until Derek mentioned it on IRC a few days ago, and then
> reviewing the old thread. So, what do people think?
:)
Tim