[Xapian-devel] Eleven, twelve; dig and delve (name conflict)

[Chuck Aurora]

Hello Xapian people, I come to you, hat in hand, on behalf of a 
fellow Free Software project: ISC's BIND 9.

If you're very familiar with DNS, you probably know our main DNS 
troubleshooting tool: dig(1), the Domain Information Groper. This has 
been an important part of BIND since forever.

We're about to release (remember! You heard it here first!!) our 
newest branch of the BIND9 family, BIND 9.10.0, which includes a 
fabulously cool new Domain Entity Lookup and Validation Engine 
command-line tool, which we named ... you guessed it ... delve.

One of our friends from the Debian project pointed out that you 
already use that name here. Hmmm, the name "delve" certainly also 
makes sense in terms of search engine software, we must admit.

But long ago was this:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One,_Two,_Buckle_My_Shoe

So we thought our name was pretty cool, since dig and delve will 
hereafter be a team. Where dig is about sending individual queries to 
individual name servers, delve is about sending all the queries 
necessary to get the best answer, validate it, and report on anything 
that went wrong.  So where dig can be used for troubleshooting a 
particular name server, delve is for troubleshooting whole-system 
problems in which multiple servers have to be consistent with each 
another -- lame delegations, DS/DNSKEY mismatches, things like that.

We do NOT wish to step on anyone's toes, and we certainly did not 
intend any disrespect for your project here. We simply did not know 
about your delve tool.

I looked at your wiki:
    http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/PackagingXapian
which says that delve is something a packager might want to include. 
Would it be a problem for your users if your delve was installed 
somewhere outside the search path, i.e., under /usr/share/xapian ?

I'm sure the packagers can come up with alternatives. Likewise, we 
are willing to entertain alternate naming suggestions for our delve 
tool. (Extra credit for nursery rhyme references. Double extra 
credit where the name is also an acronym. Triple if "dig" is also
mentioned.)

But we figured there could come no harm from asking you if you would 
consider moving and/or renaming your delve tool.

Thanks for your time, and best wishes.
-- 
    Chuck Aurora : ISC Software Support : cba at isc.org
    Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.