Re: Naming issue (Was: Need help to move Alexandria)

[Laurent Sansonetti <lrz gnome org>]

On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 13:08 +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> fre 2004-07-30 klockan 23:35 +0200 skrev Laurent Sansonetti:
> > On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 21:32, Ross Golder wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 19:32 +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> > > > fre 2004-07-30 klockan 11.11 skrev Laurent Sansonetti:
> > > 
> > > > > Also, I would like to ask for a general mailing list
> > > > > (alexandria-list gnome org sounds good),
> > > > 
> > > > Should be possible. I don't have the time to fix this myself this week
> > > > though.
> > > 
> > > I can do this, if required. Probably better to wait a bit first to be
> > > sure there are no firm objections or changes of mind regarding the
> > > project name. Here are a couple of other software projects I turned up
> > > with the same name on Google:
> > > 
> > > http://www.goalexandria.com/
> > > http://www.gnu.org/software/alexandria/lsm2003/html/slide_4.html
> > > http://alexandria.sdc.ucsb.edu/public-documents/proposal/node5.html
> > 
> > Mmh, I wasn't aware of the naming issue...
> > 
> > I found another project with the same name:
> > 
> > http://jakarta.apache.org/alexandria/
> > 
> > If it's really problematic we can consider a name change.  Alexandria
> > seems to be already used by several free software projects.  But AFAIK
> > Alexandria isn't used by the Debian, Mandrake and FreeBSD packaging
> > system yet (I believe it's the same case for Redhat/Fedora as well).
> 
> If you can consider a name change, then I think it's the best option. In
> my experience, when there's a conflicting name, the situation doesn't
> improve over time, and the more used the name gets, the more difficult
> it gets to change. A conflicting name can easily "stick" and cause more
> problems over time than one would initially expect.
> 
> On the other hand, we probably do not want the naming issue to
> completely block the use of gnome.org resources for development. In my
> opinion, you can go ahead and import this piece of software into
> cvs.gnome.org -- we can always rename the cvs module later should we
> need to do that. Of course, if you can think of a better name before you
> import it, that's the preferrable option.
> 

I have discussed this with the other maintainer and we decided to not
change the project name until the 1.0.0 release (which could arrive the
next year).

In the meantime we believe it is better to keep the current name, to not
confuse the existing user base (which is growing).

> Mailing lists is another matter -- they are not easily renamed. If
> possible, we should probably wait with creating any mailing lists until
> the naming issue is completely resolved, in my opinion.

We can keep the existing mailing lists on rubyforge.org.  I think it is
better anyway, because the users would not have to re-subscribe again.

I would be happy to move Alexandria in the GNOME CVS nevertheless.
Would it be possible to keep the existing CVS history?

Laurent