5 ms·
> Well, because it's true: many of the repositories are named after "Wacom". It's a historical legacy on GNU/Linux. It's also a decade-long debate that these re
by ndiddy 4mo ago
> Well, because it's true: many of the repositories are named after "Wacom". It's a historical legacy on GNU/Linux. It's also a decade-long debate that these repos should be renamed differently.
If the project being named after Wacom is actively causing other companies to not contribute because they believe it’s a Wacom lead project and they’d be helping a competitor, I don’t understand why this is even a debate vs. just changing the name to something vendor neutral.
- otikik 4mo agoYes. It feels like the article was leading towards a reason for not doing that, but then suddenly it just ends.
- yk 4mo agoPretty sure the reason is, that anybody who could actually do the changes thinks works for me, the alternative is a lot of work for little technical gain. And besides once you start your tablet for Linux Projekt you have to touch everything, so that is a nice opportunity to finally refactor the wacom_debug_2 mess and pretty soon you're drowning in yak shavings.
- otikik 4mo agoIt could be a fork, no need to "actually rename" anything
- burnte 4mo agoAnd it's been a decade long argument? Sounds like someone is just emotionally attached to something not changing. Those are the hardest problems to solve.
- KaiserPro 4mo agoName changes are controversial. Nothing gets nerds going more than changing a project name so companies work better with OSS.
- Onavo 4mo agomain vs master
- inigyou 4mo agopersonally my default branch is called dominatrix, just to annoy the kind of person who argues about master
- egypturnash 4mo agoDo you call all your subsidiary branches “paypigs”?
- wiether 4mo agoThe issue has always been with the reasons invoked to make the change Otherwise it would have been smoother
- happymellon 4mo agoYou didn't hear the foaming at the mouth shouting to rename master recordings, master documents, or dub over The Master from Dr. Who. Considering how much effort we had to out into fixing pipelines because of hardcoded scripts, and the lack of good reason to do it its no surprise that it was scoffed at. White keyboard warriors needed to make a change, but couldn't do anything meaningful as it would require actually doing something. At least this change makes sense.
- ChocolateGod 4mo agoI thought the purpose of the rename was to encourage these contributions that apparently weren't happening because of the branch name? It certainly helped GNOME whom was one of the biggest proponents /s
- chadgpt3 4mo ago
- myrmidon 4mo agoNot necessarily. The technical people managing the repos might just be opposed to name changing in general (seeing how a boatload of links, references, documentation would require updating, some of which you don't even control), and meanwhile those people might feel the "misbranding" drawbacks much less (if at all).
- shermantanktop 4mo agoThat’s exactly it. So many engineers aspire to build generalized, flexible components that get tons of adoption by being easy to use. The problem is that they have have just volunteered to be disconnected from their users. And this myopic refusal to rename Libwacom is a perfect example. It’s probably down to one underappreciated Linux dev somewhere who is tired of the debate and spends their time fixing actual bugs.
- burnte 4mo agoI would categorize all those as emotional reasons not to change, not logical reasons. "It's hard!" So? "It's complicated" So? "Some of it other people control." This will always be the case, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. If the status quo means a worse project, then you're not changing because you don't WANT to, not because it's a good idea. And that's an emotional, not logical ,decision.
- ffaccount2 4mo ago>"It's hard!" So? "It's complicated" So? So there's no point in wasting time on this, if perceived problems are low or nonexistent. Current maintainers probably look at it from a technical pov "it's just a name, who cares"
- nine_k 4mo ago> it's just a name, who cares This cannot be, naming things is one of the two canonical hard problems.
- 4mo ago
- jrm4 4mo agoPreach. And it's a disease. Signed, the guy who will forever believe GIMP could have been a contender with a name change decades ago.
- pmontra 4mo agoIn non-English speaking countries gimp is a short word that is so seldom used that nobody knows what it means. I used GIMP for a very long time before running into a story about the meaning of the English world. It was only GNU Image Manipulation Program to me. It still is a contender for image editing programs, for limited photo retouch, for very limited drawing (draw a rectangle outline without googling?) I use LibreOffice Draw for that.
- jrm4 4mo agoI've been up and down this debate a million times, a lot of it here, suffice it to say -- the fact that you and others don't recognize this does not at all detract from my point. To summarize, it's not e.g. about me being personally offended -- it's about people like me (a long time ago) wanting to show people this great software and other reasonable people seeing the name, understanding the meaning, and reasonably thinking "If this software were actually good, why does it have such a ridiculous and often offensive name?" An unserious name -- literally chosen to be an edgy joke -- projects "unserious software."
- ffaccount2 4mo agoNobody in my middle and high school had any idea "gimp" had an English meaning. I assume if anyone knew, we kids would at least occasionally joke about it (we used gimp for various projects). It was long after university after I learned that it's also an English word.
- jrm4 4mo agoI don't know why people keep making this point as if it matters; it sounds like you might be trying to absolve the creators or something. But again, the people who gave the name to the project deliberately chose it because they found its slight offensiveness to be funny. They knew what they were doing and chose to continue to do it anyway.
- MomsAVoxell 4mo agoIts most likely a debate because making such a major refactoring effort is actually a heavy work load, there are lots of bits and pieces to tie together and cut out and so on, and the folks capable of shepherding this change through all the parties out into the distro's are already underpaid/under-appreciated too much as it is .. Hopefully, this situation will get some traction with a bit of noise about it, and the distros can actually put some effort into handling the rename - or maybe a hero will arise in the midst of all the fuss, who just does the full renaming properly, tested, and so on - in a fashion that it simply can't be ignored. It's definitely an interesting thing to see this happening, anyway. Open Source has many, many troublesome facets when it comes to fairness and equity, but it also has a lot of bright, shining moments. The fact that the technical ability to build these drivers is already a given, and really the thing holding everything back is just the corporate brand obsession, is kind of hilarious though, also. Duh, you own your competitor by pushing your tech into their brand-space, dummies. This is an opportunity for brands-not-Wacom to eat Wacoms lunch in a delightfully technologically significant way - but, alas, the brand cult reared its maw, instead...
- LocalH 4mo agoDevil's advocate: why should the project have to rename because some companies want them to? That just shifts the window slightly closer to corporate control, something that millions of people worldwide bemoan.
- exe34 4mo agoMore importantly, why would other companies offer free support for something that will garner free advertising for a competitor?
- LocalH 4mo agoNobody except power user tech heads (and apparently, corporations) give two shits about the filenames of the drivers in use
- redeeman 4mo agoi was in the market for a drawing tablet. I looked at huion, wanted it, but realized the driver situation was not on par with wacom. I now have a wacom device.
- sib 4mo agoI mean, if you look at it that way, it's already named 100% after a single company...