WhyTheName

April 4, 2015 8:41 PM

"libcaca pretends to be an acronym for 'Color AsCii Art', but really it's self-deprecating code: 'caca' means 'poo' in French."

The etymology of Debian package names .
posted by swift (25 comments total)

Sadly, sextractor did not make the cut.
posted by Tad Naff at 9:18 PM on April 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also in Spanish! Sir Francis Drake captured a Spanish galleon called the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, nicknamed "Cacafuego", whose nickname entered English in a somewhat sanitised version as "spitfire".
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 9:22 PM on April 4, 2015 [4 favorites]

Tad Naff: that's OK, I am sure we can all tell what sextractor does.
posted by idiopath at 9:39 PM on April 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

I like how popular "semi-arbitrary animal" ends up being.
posted by idiopath at 9:54 PM on April 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

The developer who named the software originally attributed the term to the author Orson Scott Card, but Card was borrowing it from Ursula K Le Guin.

I'm glad to see the ansible being properly credited here.
posted by Sequence at 10:04 PM on April 4, 2015 [4 favorites]

/me facepalms at Navigator -> Explorer -> Konqueror

(FYI konqueror is the predecessor to Safari and the Chrome browser)
posted by idiopath at 10:16 PM on April 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

The logo implies they were thinking of the fish rather than the polearm
posted by brennen at 10:48 PM on April 4, 2015

owl
client for Zephyr, which was the original Instant Messaging protocol for Project Athena - Zephyr being the Greek god of the west wind and the owl being the (wind-borne) mascot of Athena (the "staying up all night" part might be relevant too). This package has approximately zero users, but there's also a fork called barnowl which has at least a few
posted by mfu at 5:05 AM on April 5, 2015

I like how popular "semi-arbitrary animal" ends up being.

One of my favorite package name stories is Bison. See, Bison is an improved version of Yacc, which is short for Yet Another Compiler Compiler, but it's pronounced yak, and a bison is like a yak, soooo...
posted by Itaxpica at 6:54 AM on April 5, 2015

ant: Apache's Java build tool; an appropriate animal justified as "another neat tool"

That's it. I'm installing BSD. Because tomorrow I can shave the neckbeard, but Linux will still be covered in pimples.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:33 AM on April 5, 2015

tunefs: "You can tune a filesystem, but you can't tune a fish."
posted by Nelson at 7:45 AM on April 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

aisleriot
     solitaire; an anagram

And so another one of life's little mysteries is solved.
posted by double block and bleed at 8:32 AM on April 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

That's it. I'm installing BSD. Because tomorrow I can shave the neckbeard, but Linux will still be covered in pimples.

Will you be using ant for your builds on BSD, too? Debian didn't name "ant", it's just the name of a package you can install on Debian.
posted by kenko at 8:49 AM on April 5, 2015

Why does wine not get a mention? It's one of my favourites - both recursive and meta.

Wine Is Not an Emulator.
posted by Diag at 9:46 AM on April 5, 2015

"It has nothing to do with the Nigerian steamed bean pudding of the same name"

...well thanks for clearing that one up! *backs slowly out of room*
posted by Earthtopus at 11:46 AM on April 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Diag: "Why does wine not get a mention? It's one of my favourites - both recursive and meta.

Wine Is Not an Emulator."

It's a wiki. You could probably add that. You're right that it should probably be listed.
posted by double block and bleed at 11:51 AM on April 5, 2015

A lot of my favorite clever/dumb software names are Emacs clones, from back before Stallman made a free Emacs. EINE (“Eine Is Not Emacs”) and ZWEI (“Zwei Was Eine Initially”) are mentioned a lot of places, and somewhere I ran across a probably-apocryphal-but-I-don't-care story about two more clones called FINE (“Fine Is Not Emacs”) and THIEF (“THief Isn't Even Fine”), which I still can't think about without giggling.
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:12 PM on April 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

"emacs" of course is well known to be an acronym for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". This joke was hilarious back when 8MB was a lot of RAM. These days you can even spell "evil" without "vim". All the old editor wars jokes are dying out.
posted by Nelson at 1:31 PM on April 5, 2015 [3 favorites]

On the subject of emacs, I think Richard Stallman said that it was a shortened version of "E Macros". The "E" didn't really mean anything significant; it was simply the naming convention used at the university he was working at the time.
posted by surazal at 2:40 PM on April 5, 2015

See, Bison is an improved version of Yacc, which is short for Yet Another Compiler Compiler, but it's pronounced yak, and a bison is like a yak, soooo...

Bison used to have two parsers, a simple one called bison.simple, and a more complex one called bison.hairy.
posted by grouse at 5:46 PM on April 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

So there's bison.hairy, but we all know why there's no yacc.hairy.
posted by benito.strauss at 7:28 PM on April 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Another reason "Lake Titicaca" elicits giggles from grown men. That Mike Judge knows his stuff.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 2:27 AM on April 6, 2015

The editor in Macintosh Common Lisp was FRED--FRED Resembles Emacs Deliberately.
posted by jjwiseman at 5:57 AM on April 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Less: because less is more.
posted by dirigibleman at 1:50 PM on April 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

The editor in Macintosh Common Lisp was FRED--FRED Resembles Emacs Deliberately.

In hindsight, its biggest competitor — UREA Resembles Emacs Accidentally — never really stood a chance…
posted by nebulawindphone at 11:50 PM on April 6, 2015 [2 favorites]