Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> We have arrived at a deep and fundamental disagreement about what it
> means to make a program clear. I have pointed out that the name "plz"
> gives no information about what the package does. It is totally
> unhelpful.
>
> You contend that an arbitrary and unhelpful name is just as good as a
> helpful name.
No, that is not my contention at all. I tried to explain my position as clearly as I could in my last messages.
The argument is that we have commands to do searches
> from the name to its purpose and from words in its purpose to the
> name.
>
> Those commands are helpful, but using them is laborious by comparison
> woth the simple verbalconnection.
>
> For the packages feature, I am a beginner. I don't know those
> commands. I will learn these commands if I start using packages more,
> but there will always be many users who are beginners in this.
Users who don't know how to use the package system will not be installing the package in the first place.
>
> Whenever we add a new package, we should consider whether to change
> its name first. But plz has not been installed for long. Giving it a
> clear, meaningful name now won't cause any pain.
I agree completely. There are many unhelpful package names, such as
"corfu", "cape", "eglot", "marginalia" and "mcd". At least eglot could
be renamed "lsp-client", which tells the user exactly what it does.
Those packages have distinctive identities to those who use them. Giving them generic names does not help the user remember them; it has the opposite effect.
> A clear meaningful name does not have to be long. Someone suggested
> `curl' -- meaningful, and quite short.
As I said, I don't want to use that name, because it implies more comprehensive support for curl than I intend to provide in the library. As well, there are other packages that provide a front end to curl.
Perhaps `curl-url' would be
> even more helpful, to the many who who don't use curl -- and it is
> still short.
Thanks, but no.
> If no one has a better idea, let's rename it that way now.
curl is already taken. `curl-url' would work, but so would
`curl-http-client', which I think is relatively more meaningful.
As I've said, long, purely descriptive package names like that are less useful in the long run, as well as simply being too long.
At this time, I don't intend to rename the library. Were it to be proposed for merging into core someday, that would be different--but as has been said, that won't be the case anytime soon, if ever.