Re: Rename `eww' to `web'

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 30.06.2013 17:40, Richard Stallman wrote:
> Thanks for your contributions, but they don't entitle you to make demands
> of this sort.

I do not recall making any demands. If you mean "you better" (should've 
been "you'd better"), see 3a here: 
http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/better_2.

>      Would you take a name of an existing, live project for a new GNU project
>      with similar functionality, even if it were a good-sounding name and it
>      were convenient to do so?
>
> The issue is about command names, so you've changed the subject.

You've got a point there, but with Emacs' lack of modularity command 
names usually unambiguously map to package names. Some commands in the 
Emacs core being the exceptions.

> If we're talking about package names, then we want to avoid confusing
> users.  Therefore, when we give a package the same name as some other,
> we normally add "GNU" to distinguish.
>
> For instance, I wrote a program called Emacs even though there were
> other programs called "Emacs" at the time, and we made a Tar program
> even though there were other programs called "tar" at the time.  To
> avoid confusion, we refer to them as "GNU Emacs" and "GNU tar".

I don't know the history very well, but it seems to me that either the 
programs you replaced were incompatible with systems you were targeting 
(so you did, essentially, port them), or you didn't care about pissing 
their authors off, for example because the original programs were 
proprietary software. Or both.

Neither is likely to be the case with third-party Emacs Lisp packages.

> However, the issue at hand is about command names.  We use the same
> command names used by various other packages whenever that seems
> convenient.  For instance, the command to run GNU Emacs is just
> `emacs' and the command to run GNU tar is just `tar'.

I think this approach is based on the assumption that no user would want 
to have both programs installed on their system at the same time.