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plz -> curl?


From: Richard Stallman
Subject: plz -> curl?
Date: Mon, 16 May 2022 19:25:41 -0400

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We have arrived at a deep and fundamental disagreement about what it
means to make a program clear.  I have pointed out that the name "plz"
gives no information about what the package does.  It is totally
unhelpful.

You contend that an arbitrary and unhelpful name is just as good as a
helpful name.  The argument is that we have commands to do searches
from the name to its purpose and from words in its purpose to the
name.

Those commands are helpful, but using them is laborious by comparison
woth the simple verbalconnection.

For the packages feature, I am a beginner.  I don't know those
commands.  I will learn these commands if I start using packages more,
but there will always be many users who are beginners in this.

Whenever we add a new package, we should consider whether to change
its name first.  But plz has not been installed for long.  Giving it a
clear, meaningful name now won't cause any pain.

A clear meaningful name does not have to be long.  Someone suggested
`curl' -- meaningful, and quite short.  Perhaps `curl-url' would be
even more helpful, to the many who who don't use curl -- and it is
still short.

If no one has a better idea, let's rename it that way now.

It would still be a good thing to design a uniform interface for
fetching a page through any of the various methods Emacs supports.
But that may or may not get written, so let's DTRT for this package
now.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)





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