Re: Baobab

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sun, 13 Aug 2006, Alex Jones wrote:

> Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 02:22:46 +0100
> From: Alex Jones <alex weej com>
> To: Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>
> Cc: GNOME Desktop Developers Mailing List <desktop-devel-list gnome org>
> Subject: Re: Baobab
>
> You know I only recently noticed that the guys behind Ethereal took the
> move of renaming it to something slightly less arbitrary - "Wireshark".
> Smart move. Perhaps we should follow suit with some of our crazily-named
> apps.

In the case of Baobab I expect Gnome will have gnome-disk-usage and a
similar sounding generic name to make keep things relatively easy to
seperate out later if necessary.

When it comes to "crazily-named apps" I'm in favour of rebranding them as
with a rather generic two word /Gnome Thing/ and leaving the more
interesting names as internal codenames, which is sort of what happens
already but the internal names get exposed in a lot more places than we
might ideally like.  In effect this would be doing much like the older
commercial software vendoers where Gnome becomes the Company/Brand name
and used as a prefix to a fairly geneneric name.

Application names are partially abstracted out already by the
Internationalisation system.  I haven't heard any stories yet of
application names being accidentally translated into something
particularly offensive (or any more offensive than the English originals)
but some allowances would need to be made for local cultures.

I do think any developer would be wise to fully abstract out the
application name early on in the development process, just as they would
plan for portability even if they themselves only use one operating
system.  (Look at the troubles Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox went through
with their naming and the eventual result is a whole lot of infrastructure
which make is easy for anyone to rebrand the program using a simple
extension.) Should they a developer ever be forced to rebrand it provides
another opportunity to abstract out the name properly rather than
performing a rough find and replace and assuming they will never be forced
to repeat the process.  There may be commerical opportunities for
specially customized builds or simply cases where developers might want a
distribution to clearly mark their version as different and properly
support any troublesome changes they might have made.

-- 
Alan