[tor-dev] Renaming arm

Damian Johnson atagar at torproject.org
Tue Mar 10 16:45:19 UTC 2015


Hmmm, thread about something as squishing and infinitely debatable as
a name. What could go wrong? But before you get excited I've already
picked one, this is just to sanity check with the community that I'm
not making a stupid mistake... again.

Five years ago when I started arm [1] I had the following criteria for
picking its name...

  1. It needs to be short. This is a terminal command so anything
lengthy is just begging people to alias it down.

  2. It should be reasonably memorable. Sorry, no 'z62*'.

  3. No naming conflict with other technical things. Body parts though
are fair game though.

Clearly the name failed at #3. When I picked it the ARM processor was
just barely becoming a thing, but time marched on and now every irc
discussion goes...

  new_person: New relay operator here, any tips?
  somebody: Hey, try arm!
  new_person: The processor? I'm so confused now.
  somebody: Nope, something completely different. It's a confusing name.

I'm rewriting the whole bloody codebase so why not fix this along the way?

So without further ado the name I've picked is 'Seth'. It's easy to
type (#1), memorable (#2), and from what I can tell no SETH processors
are on the horizon. I've reserved the name on PyPI, and searchs on
wikipedia looks fine (most interesting match is the Egyptian god [2],
which is actually kinda neat).

So now just a final sanity check with you, our wonderful community.
Any strong reasons to pick something else? Nothing is set in stone yet
so still open to alternatives.

Cheers! -Damian


[1] https://www.atagar.com/arm/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_%28mythology%29


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