From: Meng Weng Wong
Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2004 8:22 AM
On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 09:28:46AM +0200, Roger Moser wrote:
| It would have been the proper etiquette to ask James if he
| minds that you
| name your libraries libspf2 and libsrs2.
while that this is true, do folks feel it is now a good idea
to push for a renaming effort? doing a renaming will be a
huge job, apparently, and will slow down the coding work
that is being done in favour of administrative "overhead".
more than likely the *2 projects will lose a number of
volunteers.
First of all, I think Roger has the correct viewpoint on this. The fact
that James, Wayne and Shevek are no longer working together is of little
interest to anyone outside the SPF developers group. It is our joint
loss, but their personal problem.
The fact that there are two libraries with exceedingly similar names
purporting to do the same thing is a source of confusion to potential
adopters and gives the appearance of infighting, which in this case is
true. I have no desire to take sides in an argument as petty as the
name of a library. However, since it looks bad from the viewpoint of
potential adopters, I feel that something needs to be done.
Since James lib was originally named libspf and Wayne's was originally
named libspf-alt, I suggest the best course of action for the community
would be to revert back to those names. I respectfully disagree with
Meng that renaming a library is a huge job. It is a more like a minor
headache, and libspf-alt was already renamed once before.
I am not qualified to judge which library is better/faster/more
compliant, nor do I even care. All I care is that potential adopters
see a situation which looks like petty squabbling, and that serves none
of us well. I am confident that the community of adopters will decide
that for themselves which library to use regardless of the claims of
either primary author. In the interest of the SPF community, I feel it
would be wise to return the library names back to the original, easily
distinguished names, which don't confer any advantage to either rival
library, and let the users decide which one they want to use.
Competition can be a good thing, but the present names cause confusion
and imply that one library supercedes another, which is not the
community position.
--
Seth Goodman