[tahoe-dev] Difficult name

Brian Warner warner at lothar.com
Thu Aug 23 17:50:04 UTC 2012


On 8/23/12 12:31 AM, Tony Arcieri wrote:

> Just call it "Tahoe", problem solved. Perhaps when you are introducing
> the project you can use its full name, the "Tahoe Least Authority
> Filesystem", and hopefully they'll remember enough of that to figure
> it out with Google ;)
> 
> I don't know how e.g. zooko normally introduces it. In fact, when he
> first showed it to me, he didn't even tell me the name ;)

We invented it during a skip trip at Lake Tahoe, so we just named it
"Tahoe", to distinguish it from the existing AllMyData codebase (derived
from the Mnet and Mojo Nation projects, and from the internal codebase
of HiveCache, which was the previous incarnation of the company). We
retroactively named that older codebase "Mountain View", since it was
mostly written in our office in city of Mountain View, California.

Zooko started using the "-LAFS" suffix a couple of years later, both
because "tahoe" by itself is hard to search for (you mostly get lakes,
mountains, and trucks), and because he liked the idea of causing people
to say "laughs" every time they mentioned the project. In speech, I've
noticed Zooko is quite consistent about spelling out each letter, every
time, which both impresses and frustrates me :-). The de-acronymization
of "LAFS" actually changes every once in a while, mostly when we update
the IRC topic and want something funny to put there.

But it's generally too much effort for me. I just say "Tahoe", and when
I need to direct someone to the web page, I tell them to search for
"tahoe filesystem" or "tahoe project" or "tahoe protocol" or even "tahoe
python" and that usually does it. The "least authority" aspect is
interesting to convey, as the the filesystem-like nature, but neither is
worth reiterating in each citation.

cheers,
 -Brian



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