Are we intentionally reusing project names now? Lynx [1] is a fairly popular tui browser. I guess it doesn’t support ssl or tls, so is now obsolete? W3M [2] is a decent tui alternative that does. Or if you use kitty, awrit [3] is nice, with images and mouse support (it renders chromium in a terminal window)
The Lynx project was originally named independently without thinking this far ahead. Since so much code and so many users already rely on it, we decided to stick with the name rather than change it just for open-sourcing.
Plenty of people have the same name, but if you call your child Brad Pitt, it will be interpreted as a reference to the famous guy bearing that name, and nobody will believe it is a coincidence.
Lynx doesn't have a large user base (I think) but it is installed by default on many linux distros. Having to install two programs with the same name is a pain which is only resolved by renaming one of them (at the distro or the user level).
Bit misleading. The analogy is closer to naming your child "Genevieve" when another Genevieve exists in the school. Lynx is a fairly common and well understood word.
> Lynx doesn't have a large user base (I think) but it is installed by default on many linux distros. Having to install two programs with the same name is a pain which is only resolved by renaming one of them (at the distro or the user level).
This is a fault of the distros. At some point keeping niche software will cause issues and conflicts.
> This is a fault of the distros. At some point keeping niche software will cause issues and conflicts.
I am not sure I agree with this argument. This gives a vibe of "make place for me, away with the old guard!"
What if someone called their program "vi" with the argument that noone uses vi anymore?
Besides, who decides what is niche and what isn't? Is a program like lynx which offers better accessibility features than mainstream browsers not worth distributing because it's niche?
Blaming the distros for already having software named like what you decide to call yours isn't terribly cooperative.
Generally agreed. I think unique names for projects are nice, but unless the projects have very similar goals, I think having the same name isn't really a big deal.
You can call it lynx all day long, but it won't be lynx in the Ubuntu repositories as that name is taken, and as you can see above, there are no duplicates.
>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
Name collisions are so common that the guidelines tell us not to talk about them. Why would you assume that this is intentional? And then the rest of your post is just about different tui browsers? How is this the top comment?
I can't tell if this is satire or a hidden advertisement for various tui browsers? A project that is a "popular tui browser" (for the literally dozens of people that use tui browsers?) does not have ownership claim to the name of a big cat genus which has 4k+ other results on GitHub with the same name.
Lynx is a well-known project which has been around for far longer than Github even existed - since 1992, in fact - which is in any case irrelevant, since it's not developed on GitHub: the commits for ThomasDickey/lynx-snapshots are snapshots of the code from the website proper.
Removed the star count as any sort of “evidence” to popularity - the point still stands though. It feels absurd to claim a name being “reused,” or implied stolen, when the name is a generic animal name.