[pmwiki-users] Why all this zapping?

Hans design5 at softflow.co.uk
Mon Apr 30 09:37:37 CDT 2007


Monday, April 30, 2007, 11:37:49 AM, The wrote:

> On 4/30/07, Kathryn Andersen <kat_lists at katspace.homelinux.org> wrote:
>> My understanding is that Dan renamed ZAP to Acme simply because he
>> wanted to appear first in all the lists in the Cookbook, rather than
>> letting ZAP stand on its own merits.  You are not the first person to
>> point out that this is confusing, and you probably won't be the last,
>> because Dan is not listening to the suggestions to revert the name back
>> to ZAP.

> Actually Kathryn, that is not completely fair.  : ).  First, there
> were several reasons--the biggest is suggested in the link I mentioned
> above at zapsite.  Second, I have actually had as much or more
> positive feedback on the name change than negative, with several
> encouraging me NOT to change it back. Actually my associate is
> encouraging me to rename Hg to AcmeHg and MarkupExpressionsExtensions
> to AcmeExtensions, etc., and I must admit I find the idea kind of
> unifying.  : )

I am not sure if there is any point in trying to take serious a paragraph
in which the author refers to himself as "my associate". Further more
I like to dissuade any contributing author on pmwiki.org to use more
than one Profile name, purely for the sake of avoiding confusion.

As for the recipe name change, which Dan did not address in his reply
to Kathryn, unless you accept a reference as an argument, I wrote and
write again, because I don't believe in white-washing history:

For the record:
Dan was asked by a number of list members to change the name of the
new MarkupExpressionsExtensions recipe to ZapExtensions, and he
answered:
> If you wish, but it tends to get buried down at the bottom of the
> list. I'd rather keep it here, [...]

In a follow on Dr Fred C wrote:
> So long as the pmwiki search engine continues to provide a rather simplistic
> alphabetical listing without attention to relevance, the most viable option for ZAP
> like projects to get proper (or improper) notice might be to consider an "aaZAP" name
> change, or perhaps use the Roadrunner/Wiley Coyote line of reasoning with "AcmeTools"

So we can safely give Dr Fred C credit for the idea to rename the ZAP
page "Acme", and deduct that Dan's prime motive for doing so is to get
ZAP to the top of pagelists in PmWiki. Since the cookbook sidebar is
now showing categories using pagelists I suspect Dan felt ZAP will not get
noticed enough.

The naming confusion will remain with us, unless the Acme cookbook
page gets renamed back to ZAP, as this is apparently the true name of
the script, as it is referred to on zapsite as ZAP, and internally
named as ZAP etc.

At the moment, we got a cookbook recipe which requires anyone
interested in it (and there will be quite a few, as the recipe claims
to do so many things one might like to add to PmWiki) to visit an
external site to find more information, and to download the script
code. There he/she looks at something named completely different,
which may be confusing (as he was looking for Acme).
Furthermore he finds himself not on zapsite.org, but on
fast.st/zapbeta, which may add to his confusion.

Maybe not so surprising knowing that coyote is referred to as
"the trickster" in the mythology of many Native American peoples. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster
No doubt Dan will love this.
But I would still prefer a less confusing experience regards to ZAP.


 ~Hans





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