6 ms·

it's not about "catchiness", it's about being able to have a unique moniker, so whoever is searching for it can find it. "Distribution" immediately is going to

by ahnick 6y ago

it's not about "catchiness", it's about being able to have a unique moniker, so whoever is searching for it can find it. "Distribution" immediately is going to clash with the multitude of linux distributions. They could have named it "image-distribution", "container-image-distribution", "cidistribution", whatever.. just something that makes it easier to find via search.

pests 6y ago
Never having heads of this before, I just popped over to Google and searched for "docker distribution" and this was the very first result. I don't think Google is going to care much if you use hyphens or spaces to separate words like that.
- ahnick 6y ago
  I suppose as long as everyone knows the etymology of this "distribution" and remembers to use the word docker before it, then it should be fine. Probably a conversation best had 10 years from now. :)
derefr 6y ago
...which is what I meant by "catchiness": the ability to have a context-free unique name. Not all products need context-free unique names. Heck, not all products even need names. ISO/ANSI standards and RFCs, for example, are just numbers. You can actually Google the most famous of these ("9001" gets you the ISO standard; "2616" gets you the RFC; etc.); but on average this doesn't work, because those numbers are small and collide with other meaningful numbers in other namespaces†. (Things like electronics part numbers, for example.) With any of these identifiers, the thing you do instead of just punching the ID into a search engine, is to first search for either 1. the website of the entity you know owns the thing, or 2. some kind of "catalog" site; and then plug the otherwise-non-unique identifier in there. Your identifier, despite not being unique generally, is unique when put in the context of a domain-specific keyspace. In this case, the keyspace is "CNCF projects", or maybe "implementations of OCI specifications." The specification for these registries is called the "OCI Distribution" spec, just like the specification Docker containers obey is the "OCI Container" spec. Look at the list of Apache Foundation projects: https://projects.apache.org/projects.html https://projects.apache.org/projects.html — how many of these have names that have no hope of being searched unless you know to prefix "Apache" to them? Chemistry? Drill? Flex? Portals? Streams, for goodness sake? And this is why I said that it wasn't important because only very specific people need to stand up their own container registries: all those people already know enough about container registries to intuitively prefix "Docker" or "OCI" or "CNCF" on their search query; or to go to those projects and navigate from there. This would be a problematic name if random people needed to install it after a word-of-mouth conversation. But they don't, any more than random people need to find the manual for the exact model of Juniper network switch in their ISP's head-end. Only their ISP's network engineer needs to do that—and that fellow has had rather a lot of exposure to Juniper products, and so likely already has their support site bookmarked. (And probably has the physical copies of the manuals, too, if they still print those.) ------ † Tangent: it'd be a fun project/blog post, to go through the Google search results for the search-terms "0" through "9999", and categorize the top results by keyspace. How many times do RFCs "win"? Etc.
- IanCal 6y ago
  > With any of these identifiers, the thing you do instead of just punching the ID into a search engine, is to first search for either 1. the website of the entity you know owns the thing, or 2. some kind of "catalog" site; and then plug the otherwise-non-unique identifier in there. Your identifier, despite not being unique generally, is unique when put in the context of a domain-specific keyspace. Nit-picky perhaps but DOIs are extremely unlikely to be used elsewhere to mean something else. In a search engine you'll get either the original article or articles that cite it. The reason you'd use something else to get to the article is that there's a single location for all of them to be resolved, and even then people will still just google them. In fact, googling them can be more reliable when they've not been correctly registered. It's not really counter to the general point, they're not useful for products and perhaps I misread your statement but DOIs absolutely work as "just look for this string".
  - derefr 6y ago
    You're right; DOIs aren't a good example. Edited to remove.
  - rb12345 6y ago
    In the case of DOIs, https://dx.doi.org/${DOI} https://dx.doi.org/${DOI} should also return the target article with no need to search.
    - IanCal 6y ago
      Only if correctly registered :) it does usually work but I'm always surprised at how frequently they don't. I work with large amounts of them though, which tends to bring out the edge cases. Googling can be more reliable, and typically safe given how unique they tend to be (again, weirdly not always). A bonus is you may get results for related pages that reference your wanted paper
- ahnick 6y ago
  The Apache projects page literally lists "Apache" in front of each of the projects you just mentioned. If I go to the apache streams github page it's url is https://github.com/apache/streams https://github.com/apache/streams not https://github.com/streams/streams https://github.com/streams/streams. Contrast that when I go to the Docker distribution github page the url is https://github.com/distribution/distribution https://github.com/distribution/distribution. You don't see anything wrong with that nomenclature? I'm the only one?

by ahnick 6y ago

pests 6y ago

Never having heads of this before, I just popped over to Google and searched for "docker distribution" and this was the very first result. I don't think Google is going to care much if you use hyphens or spaces to separate words like that.

ahnick 6y ago
I suppose as long as everyone knows the etymology of this "distribution" and remembers to use the word docker before it, then it should be fine. Probably a conversation best had 10 years from now. :)

derefr 6y ago

...which is what I meant by "catchiness": the ability to have a context-free unique name. Not all products need context-free unique names. Heck, not all products even need names. ISO/ANSI standards and RFCs, for example, are just numbers. You can actually Google the most famous of these ("9001" gets you the ISO standard; "2616" gets you the RFC; etc.); but on average this doesn't work, because those numbers are small and collide with other meaningful numbers in other namespaces†. (Things like electronics part numbers, for example.) With any of these identifiers, the thing you do instead of just punching the ID into a search engine, is to first search for either 1. the website of the entity you know owns the thing, or 2. some kind of "catalog" site; and then plug the otherwise-non-unique identifier in there. Your identifier, despite not being unique generally, is unique when put in the context of a domain-specific keyspace. In this case, the keyspace is "CNCF projects", or maybe "implementations of OCI specifications." The specification for these registries is called the "OCI Distribution" spec, just like the specification Docker containers obey is the "OCI Container" spec. Look at the list of Apache Foundation projects: https://projects.apache.org/projects.html https://projects.apache.org/projects.html — how many of these have names that have no hope of being searched unless you know to prefix "Apache" to them? Chemistry? Drill? Flex? Portals? Streams, for goodness sake? And this is why I said that it wasn't important because only very specific people need to stand up their own container registries: all those people already know enough about container registries to intuitively prefix "Docker" or "OCI" or "CNCF" on their search query; or to go to those projects and navigate from there. This would be a problematic name if random people needed to install it after a word-of-mouth conversation. But they don't, any more than random people need to find the manual for the exact model of Juniper network switch in their ISP's head-end. Only their ISP's network engineer needs to do that—and that fellow has had rather a lot of exposure to Juniper products, and so likely already has their support site bookmarked. (And probably has the physical copies of the manuals, too, if they still print those.) ------ † Tangent: it'd be a fun project/blog post, to go through the Google search results for the search-terms "0" through "9999", and categorize the top results by keyspace. How many times do RFCs "win"? Etc.

IanCal 6y ago
> With any of these identifiers, the thing you do instead of just punching the ID into a search engine, is to first search for either 1. the website of the entity you know owns the thing, or 2. some kind of "catalog" site; and then plug the otherwise-non-unique identifier in there. Your identifier, despite not being unique generally, is unique when put in the context of a domain-specific keyspace. Nit-picky perhaps but DOIs are extremely unlikely to be used elsewhere to mean something else. In a search engine you'll get either the original article or articles that cite it. The reason you'd use something else to get to the article is that there's a single location for all of them to be resolved, and even then people will still just google them. In fact, googling them can be more reliable when they've not been correctly registered. It's not really counter to the general point, they're not useful for products and perhaps I misread your statement but DOIs absolutely work as "just look for this string".
- derefr 6y ago
  You're right; DOIs aren't a good example. Edited to remove.
- rb12345 6y ago
  In the case of DOIs, https://dx.doi.org/${DOI} https://dx.doi.org/${DOI} should also return the target article with no need to search.
  - IanCal 6y ago
    Only if correctly registered :) it does usually work but I'm always surprised at how frequently they don't. I work with large amounts of them though, which tends to bring out the edge cases. Googling can be more reliable, and typically safe given how unique they tend to be (again, weirdly not always). A bonus is you may get results for related pages that reference your wanted paper
ahnick 6y ago
The Apache projects page literally lists "Apache" in front of each of the projects you just mentioned. If I go to the apache streams github page it's url is https://github.com/apache/streams https://github.com/apache/streams not https://github.com/streams/streams https://github.com/streams/streams. Contrast that when I go to the Docker distribution github page the url is https://github.com/distribution/distribution https://github.com/distribution/distribution. You don't see anything wrong with that nomenclature? I'm the only one?