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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    KSysGuard renaming
From:       "Greg Martyn" <greg.martyn () gmail ! com>
Date:       2006-06-06 15:34:45
Message-ID: 6e0c99d0606060834i607ccf99gae379cdd63b1d2a9 () mail ! gmail ! com
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Last night on IRC, John Tapsell mentioned that he wanted to rename
KSysGuard, and I immediately agreed. The new name was to be
kde-system-monitor, undeniably influenced by gnome-system-monitor.
Being that we are the current maintainers of KSysGuard and nobody on
IRC objected, I went ahead and started making the change.

IRC was definitely the wrong place to make that sort of decision, as
was apparent from the emails that I got about it. I shouldn't have
acted so quickly without having a full public discussion first, but I
still think I was right ;-)


Objections were of the following forms:

1. But think of the SVN history!
Regardless of the validity of this complaint, the damage has already
been done. It's not as bad as some may think though -- svn blame
survives a svn mv, so the only lines affected are those that contain
"ksysguard." (not to mention that svn blame can take a revision number
as an argument)

2. This is totally inconsistent with the naming of other KDE applications.
It is. I want to discuss this.

3. Think of the packagers!
Even if we don't switch all the way over to kde-system-monitor, I
think there is a strong argument for switching away from ksysguard.
IIRC, 'guard' meant something in a non-English language, but that
doesn't make it any less misleading to English speakers. I remember
being confused that the "system guard" has nothing to do with backing
up my files or protecting me from black hats. Guard -> Monitor is the
logical choice. Google tells me that that ksysmon may be in use, but I
can't find an actual ksysmon program to download. There is already a
kicker applet that goes by "System Monitor", but by the time KDE4
comes out, I hope to have ksysguard's applet encapsulate System
Monitor's behavior.


Personally I think that gnome got it right with their gnome-something
names. They are easy to guess (try typing 'gnome-'[tab][tab] for a
nice list of the gnome system apps), self explanatory, and anyone
without tab completion is used to suffering anyway. Even if you knew
that you wanted to open KDE System Guard, would you know to type
ksysguard? I think that it's time for a change.

I do understand that things must be done the "kde way" here though, so
I'm open to KDE-style names if we have to go that way.

Thanks for your flames/comments,
Greg Martyn
 
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