8 ms·

libcrurl vs libcurl, I know naming things is hard but this just seems hostile against the Curl developer.

jsty 7y ago
Admittedly they're a little hard to differentiate at first glance, but is 'hostile' not pushing things a little too far? There's a long history of derivatives of open source tools having similar-ish names, often differing by a single letter - just look at all the 'make' derivatives: pmake, bmake, fmake, gmake, rmake, nmake, ... to name but a few that Wikipedia mentions [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software)#Derivatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software)#Derivatives
- zapzupnz 7y ago
  At least those all have the decency to be prefixes. Those are much easier to parse.
- EwanToo 7y ago
  If you launched an alternative search engine called Gooogle, I don't think Google would consider it a friendly move :)
  - jsty 7y ago
    Very true. I probably should've caveated that I don't actually think it's a good name choice, just that I doubt it was chosen to mislead / as an attack on (lib)curl. Given my own uselessness with naming things sometimes, I tend to be forgiving!
    - Spivak 7y ago
      Like we're talking about software developers here. I think it's funny that when a Google engineer does it there's some shadowy motivation to usurp a FOSS downloader library -- like they aren't like the rest of us picking silly names for things. "Hey, curl is a super useful tool, it would be nice if it used our new fancy network protocol" "Yeah, what should we name it?" "Uhh -- wait, I got it. crurl and the library could be libcrurl" "Hilarious! It's perfect!"
  - eesmith 7y ago
    Case in point from 2006 - https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/google-chmoogle/3001845.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/google-chmoogle/3001845.... : > A new chemistry search engine has been forced to change its name from ’Chmoogle’ to ’eMolecules’ following pressure from the search engine Google.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    We're talking about two categories of people. The software developers would have no problem with stuff like this. Go ahead and create a UX toolkit called Fluttershy. But if you mess with someone's actual products that make them money you'd probably hear from their legal team.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  If not for Google's recent spate of scraping people's stuff and publishing it verbatim with zero attribution, they'd get the benefit of the doubt regarding maliciousness. See genius.com's recent accusations The smell like some "developer's developer" who thinks he can do a better job of libcurl and is so cocksure that he's going with the name libcrurl. Perhaps he'll put his name on it. Unlikely, as that would require skin in the game.
- pritambaral 7y ago
  Neither of those make derivatives has a likelihood of being readably confused with the original similar to the libcurl/libcrurl comparison.
- rlue 7y ago
  Prefixing a word with another letter is perceptually different from slipping one in the middle, especially when the new letter is one of the four letters already in the name. What Google has done here would be more comparable to releasing a new utility called 'mkake'. As the author of curl points out, it just looks like a typo. When it's this egregious, your only choices are to assume either incompetence or bad faith.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    I mean don't think for a second that mcake couldn't be the name of a build utility that uses baking terms. mcake knead && mcake bake
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Then Google should follow that pattern and call it glibcurl Which clearly reads as "the g(oogle) implementation of libcurl"
  - josteink 7y ago
    It could easily be mistaken as a GNU implementation (ref glib, gmake, etc).
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      Fair. But crurl is something my auto-correct extensions would assume I fat fingered.
- simion314 7y ago
  In your examples the first letter is different, the names do not suffer of the confusion issue, me and other people read the name wrong(our eyes or brain tricked us)
- laumars 7y ago
  crurl and libcrurl look almost visually identical to curl and libcurl - to the point that many on HN genuinely misread Google's names to be their original counterparts. Whereas your make examples are much easier to visually differentiate. If curl was trademarked then they would have a strong case here.
- maccard 7y ago
  Slightly different in that case that they're introducing a new different letter at the start. What if I called my tool mmake, or mkake?
- smittywerben 7y ago
  Chrome and curl seem like competing products. But I agree. I don't see this as that bad relative to the other things they're doing at the moment (i.e. breaking uBlock, user agent blocking). In any case I admire curl has a binary size of ~1MB, which is 1/5 the size of my filter list for Chrome.
TheCycoONE 7y ago
Could be worse - like when MS added curl as a powershell alias. https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/pull/1901 https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/pull/1901
- signal11 7y ago
  Windows 10 builds have included a 'real' curl for about a year now (build 1803 onwards IIRC)[1] [1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/01/13/microsoft-curls-too/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/01/13/microsoft-curls-too/
  - smittywerben 7y ago
    Just to reiterate- in Windows 8/Server 2012 (PS ~3-5), writing "curl" would just alias to "Invoke-WebRequest". Prior discussion from 2016 on hn[0]. But since December 2017, Windows 10 build 1803 includes curl.exe (along with ssh!) These deprecated my use of chocolatey, and hopefully moves people away from Putty. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670
- Spivak 7y ago
  I really don't see what all the drama was over. Those aliases are incredibly valuable to me. I can never remember the PS equivalents of unix-y commands and those aliases let me use my current muscle memory. Sure the options are different but it's really not all that different than switching between GNU/Linux, MacOS, and BSD and having to deal with differences. PS> cd C:\Users\ PS> ls PS> wget https://example.com And it makes discovery super easy when you can Get-Help just about every unix command and it will show you more-or-less the appropriate equivalent. The thread just looks like a bunch of people with a bone to pick against MS trying to take some moral high-ground with a change that was added to genuinely help users.
TheRealPomax 7y ago
don't assume malice when "we suck at names and the first dumb name seems to stick without a marketing department overriding the naming choice" is also an option.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Marketing is busy branding the next 5 years worth of annual messaging applications.
  - TheRealPomax 7y ago
    A company I once worked for spent $40,000 to find a good product name. It ended up being the same name people had already pitched for free internally.
captainbland 7y ago
They missed a trick by not naming it libgurl.

jsty 7y ago

Admittedly they're a little hard to differentiate at first glance, but is 'hostile' not pushing things a little too far? There's a long history of derivatives of open source tools having similar-ish names, often differing by a single letter - just look at all the 'make' derivatives: pmake, bmake, fmake, gmake, rmake, nmake, ... to name but a few that Wikipedia mentions [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software)#Derivatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software)#Derivatives

zapzupnz 7y ago
At least those all have the decency to be prefixes. Those are much easier to parse.
EwanToo 7y ago
If you launched an alternative search engine called Gooogle, I don't think Google would consider it a friendly move :)
- jsty 7y ago
  Very true. I probably should've caveated that I don't actually think it's a good name choice, just that I doubt it was chosen to mislead / as an attack on (lib)curl. Given my own uselessness with naming things sometimes, I tend to be forgiving!
  - Spivak 7y ago
    Like we're talking about software developers here. I think it's funny that when a Google engineer does it there's some shadowy motivation to usurp a FOSS downloader library -- like they aren't like the rest of us picking silly names for things. "Hey, curl is a super useful tool, it would be nice if it used our new fancy network protocol" "Yeah, what should we name it?" "Uhh -- wait, I got it. crurl and the library could be libcrurl" "Hilarious! It's perfect!"
- eesmith 7y ago
  Case in point from 2006 - https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/google-chmoogle/3001845.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/google-chmoogle/3001845.... : > A new chemistry search engine has been forced to change its name from ’Chmoogle’ to ’eMolecules’ following pressure from the search engine Google.
- Spivak 7y ago
  We're talking about two categories of people. The software developers would have no problem with stuff like this. Go ahead and create a UX toolkit called Fluttershy. But if you mess with someone's actual products that make them money you'd probably hear from their legal team.
huffmsa 7y ago
If not for Google's recent spate of scraping people's stuff and publishing it verbatim with zero attribution, they'd get the benefit of the doubt regarding maliciousness. See genius.com's recent accusations The smell like some "developer's developer" who thinks he can do a better job of libcurl and is so cocksure that he's going with the name libcrurl. Perhaps he'll put his name on it. Unlikely, as that would require skin in the game.
pritambaral 7y ago
Neither of those make derivatives has a likelihood of being readably confused with the original similar to the libcurl/libcrurl comparison.
rlue 7y ago
Prefixing a word with another letter is perceptually different from slipping one in the middle, especially when the new letter is one of the four letters already in the name. What Google has done here would be more comparable to releasing a new utility called 'mkake'. As the author of curl points out, it just looks like a typo. When it's this egregious, your only choices are to assume either incompetence or bad faith.
- Spivak 7y ago
  I mean don't think for a second that mcake couldn't be the name of a build utility that uses baking terms. mcake knead && mcake bake
huffmsa 7y ago
Then Google should follow that pattern and call it glibcurl Which clearly reads as "the g(oogle) implementation of libcurl"
- josteink 7y ago
  It could easily be mistaken as a GNU implementation (ref glib, gmake, etc).
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    Fair. But crurl is something my auto-correct extensions would assume I fat fingered.
simion314 7y ago
In your examples the first letter is different, the names do not suffer of the confusion issue, me and other people read the name wrong(our eyes or brain tricked us)
laumars 7y ago
crurl and libcrurl look almost visually identical to curl and libcurl - to the point that many on HN genuinely misread Google's names to be their original counterparts. Whereas your make examples are much easier to visually differentiate. If curl was trademarked then they would have a strong case here.
maccard 7y ago
Slightly different in that case that they're introducing a new different letter at the start. What if I called my tool mmake, or mkake?
smittywerben 7y ago
Chrome and curl seem like competing products. But I agree. I don't see this as that bad relative to the other things they're doing at the moment (i.e. breaking uBlock, user agent blocking). In any case I admire curl has a binary size of ~1MB, which is 1/5 the size of my filter list for Chrome.

TheCycoONE 7y ago

Could be worse - like when MS added curl as a powershell alias. https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/pull/1901 https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/pull/1901

signal11 7y ago
Windows 10 builds have included a 'real' curl for about a year now (build 1803 onwards IIRC)[1] [1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/01/13/microsoft-curls-too/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/01/13/microsoft-curls-too/
- smittywerben 7y ago
  Just to reiterate- in Windows 8/Server 2012 (PS ~3-5), writing "curl" would just alias to "Invoke-WebRequest". Prior discussion from 2016 on hn[0]. But since December 2017, Windows 10 build 1803 includes curl.exe (along with ssh!) These deprecated my use of chocolatey, and hopefully moves people away from Putty. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670
Spivak 7y ago
I really don't see what all the drama was over. Those aliases are incredibly valuable to me. I can never remember the PS equivalents of unix-y commands and those aliases let me use my current muscle memory. Sure the options are different but it's really not all that different than switching between GNU/Linux, MacOS, and BSD and having to deal with differences. PS> cd C:\Users\ PS> ls PS> wget https://example.com And it makes discovery super easy when you can Get-Help just about every unix command and it will show you more-or-less the appropriate equivalent. The thread just looks like a bunch of people with a bone to pick against MS trying to take some moral high-ground with a change that was added to genuinely help users.

TheRealPomax 7y ago

don't assume malice when "we suck at names and the first dumb name seems to stick without a marketing department overriding the naming choice" is also an option.

huffmsa 7y ago
Marketing is busy branding the next 5 years worth of annual messaging applications.
- TheRealPomax 7y ago
  A company I once worked for spent $40,000 to find a good product name. It ended up being the same name people had already pitched for free internally.

captainbland 7y ago

They missed a trick by not naming it libgurl.