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myrmidontoday at 2:18 PM4 repliesview on HN

Not 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).


Replies

burntetoday at 3:13 PM

I 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.

show 7 replies
shermantanktoptoday at 3:08 PM

That’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.

bandofthehawktoday at 3:23 PM

It seems like it would be simple to just create a fork and archive the old repo. Add a note to the old repo, update a couple of the most important docs and links, and then worry about the rest later. It can be low hanging fruit for new contributors.

nine_ktoday at 5:02 PM

Change is painful in general. But it may have a sufficient upside to withstand the pain.