Re: Git trademark status and policy

On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 02:22:22PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 11:25:31AM +0200, Christian Couder wrote:

quoted

quoted

(Also, to be clear, this is all _only_ about "Git Cola". The "git-cola"
command is explicitly OK in the policy because that's how commands
work).

I agree about "git-cola" though I wonder about "git-dag" as this is
another command used by the project that is more generic. For example
I could imagine that, if we wanted to provide a shortcut for `git log
--graph --decorate --oneline`, we might want to use `git dag`.

I guess we can still recommend to change it if possible, though we can
also acknowledge that, as our recommendation comes very late (too
late?), it is just a "weak" recommendation.

Yeah, I agree with you, though I think it is a separate issue. "git-dag"
is explicitly OK in the trademark policy, and they are not using "Git
Dag" in any recognizable way.

So I think there is no trademark issue, but "git-dag" is probably just
not a great idea in general, because the namespace is open and it is
likely to get stomped by some other project. Or git itself. Or it may
even be annoying for users who have a "git dag" alias (on-disk commands
always override aliases).

So I think we should generally recommend against such generic names
during the naming phase. At this point, I'm not sure the pain of
changing now is any less than the pain of changing later if and when
there's a conflict.

I think I'm actually violently agreeing with you, but I wanted to make
it clear. :) (And everything else in your email seemed sensible, too).

-Peff

Thanks for the recommendation.  I'm open to changing the name in a
future major release.  For users that already use the short "dag" name,
we can transition over to something else if it's relatively short and
sweet.

Maybe a better name would be "git-kcola" (a nod to gitk), or "git-vdag"
for "visual DAG"?  Any sugs?  I'm terrible at naming things, but I do
refrain from using additional "git-*" names beyond these two for the
project.  I kinda like "vdag" since it's easy to type, and nearby the
existing "dag" name.

There's also one more script, but it's never installed in the users's
$PATH and is more of an internal implementation detail.  Git Cola
includes a GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR-compatible "git-xbase" command that
provides a visual interactive rebase feature.  That command should
probably be renamed to "cola-git-seq-editor" to make that clearer, and
also to open up the possibility of installing it in bin/ in the future
since it is useful on its own.

The rationale for two commands is that worktree diff+commit and history
inspection are our two primary use-cases.  Everything else is provided
as a sub-command, "git cola rebase", "git cola stash", etc. so there's
not much pressure to add more top-level names, just these two.

Thoughts?
-- 
David