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Re: On new names for "Deity"



bruce@va.debian.org  wrote on 27.02.98 in <19980227185439.214.qmail@va.debian.org>:

> "Deity" was a code-name, and was never intended to be used for the final
> product. As I've mentioned previously, it has religeous connotations.

I thought that when I first heard the name, but ...

> This is serious for some people. In New York, not the traditional hotbed
> of religeon, I worked with a systems operator who would not chmod files
> to 666 because it was the number of the beast, and a systems programmer
> who would not let users have "godzilla" as a user name because it contained
> the substring "god". Religeon makes some people crazy. Let's avoid use of
> religeous names.

... if those are the only examples you can come up with, then I must say  
that I'm sorry, but I find it completely impossible to take people like  
that serious. "Crazy", as in the medical term, would seem a good  
description.

If we want to care for all the funny ideas of _really_ crazy people, we  
might as well give up in the first place.

> I think we should go with "Trove" for the package management portion of
> our administration tool suite, and go on to other issues now. It's a unique

I do think that "trove" has a very serious problem in common with "deity".  
Both are far too obscure for non-native speakers - most of them won't know  
either word. (Actually, I've used "deity" before, if only seldom - I've  
never used "trove".)

Because of that, I actually think that both "deity" and "trove" are bad  
names.

If you are going to choose a name that's just a random selection of  
letters to most people (remember: most people are not native speakers of  
English), at least use letters that mean something by themselves.

Or otherwise use pwgen -8.

> So far, I haven't heard much suggestion that this is a horrible hateful
> name.

Well, you have now,

> I think we spend way too much time on the names of things. I don't

Names are important. If you didn't think that, you wouldn't want to change  
that name.

> think we need to continue to throw ideas into the hat and go on to an
> election about them :-) .

You just about convinced me that that's what we do need to do.


MfG Kai


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