Re: The naming question (Postgres vs PostgreSQL)

Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> I have been avoiding voting on this topic.  But. . .
>
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 01:23:17PM -0400, Robert Bernier wrote:
>
> > > > How many people feel we should adopt 'postgres' for the '9.0'
> > > > reference documentation (let's leave the issue of the tons of work
> > > > involved out of the debate for the moment)?
>
> First, discussing this without reference to the work it would cause
> and such like is foolish.  You don't commit to doing something only
> because it would be a nice idea; you also do it recognising that
> spending the time doing that thing entails you don't have other time
> for other things you might like.  So how much work it might be is a
> _critical piece of information_ for deciding what you should do.  The
> glib responses in this thread suggest to me that at least some people
> haven't worked through that.  Moreover,

OK, let's look at the items required for a name change.  Right now our
FAQ says "Postgres" is an acceptable name for "PostgreSQL", so the idea
of allowing Postgres as an alternative is already done.  Our backend
binary is called "postgres", which we got from the Berkely days and
never changed to "PostgreSQL".

Items to change include:

    1)  URLs, can use redirection
    2)  Documentation, search/replace
    3)  email list names, keep pgsql-*
    4)  web site content, search/replace
    5)  tarball names
    6)  source code copyright notice
    7)  postgresql.conf, rename

The user API has nearly zero change, which is good;  nearly everything
is "pg".  (We still call our C library libpq because it was originally
PostQUEL.)

As you can see, it isn't much.  Renaming sounds like a monumental
change, but in fact the name is kind of just what we call ourselves.

I think an interesting approach would be to change the software name to
Postgres but keep the community/project name as PostgreSQL Global
Development Group.  That would allow us to keep using both and minimize
changes.  It would allow the places we don't change to remain accurate.

--
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>          http://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                               http://www.enterprisedb.com

  + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +