Re: [Monotone-devel] renaming monotone executable (again)

[Timothy Brownawell]

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