Re: What's the name of this library? (was: Re: autotools transition report: v 28.07)

[Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr at integrable-solutions dot net>]

Phil Edwards <phil@jaj.com> writes:

| > *** po.cvs/Makefile	2003-07-31 20:06:39.000000000 -0500
| > --- po.orig/Makefile	2003-07-31 18:19:26.000000000 -0500
| > ! PACKAGE = libstdc++
| > --- 65,208 ----
| > + PACKAGE = libstdc++-v3
| 
| Your Honor, may I present Exhibit A: the smoking gun.

For historical reasons (in all senses) it would be a bit confusing to
rename the whole thing.  The old library is still there (through CVS
for example). I don't know how many people/coorporates are still using it.

Will the project of building a run-time system for C++0x be called -v4?
That is not just a rhetorical question.

I'm not comfortable with this project being the only one whose name is
derived for the language name PLUS -v3.  A bit of consistency here
would be appreciable.  But it clearly contradicts the previous point.

A question: is V3 supposed to reflect the '3' in GCC-3.x?
I bet many users out there think so.  If that were true, then we have
a big communication problem.

I would suggest that, at least for users we publish "libstdc++" as the
official name of this library.  In some sense, we're already doing so
since the mailing list is 'libstdc++@gcc.gnu.org'.  Also teahc auto*
to understand the obvious -- that may be a problem for people still
building the old library.

I'm undecided whether we should also do an internal renaming.

[...]

| 5) Build a time machine.  Travel to the mid/late 90's.  Convince the
|    maintainers to call their new project "libstdcxx".

and future maintainers will do the same to convince them to name it
"libstdcyy" because they would want to call their projects libstdcxx ;-D

|  Obviate the need
|    for bizarre little tweaks all through the CVS server backend scripts
|    because "++" isn't matched by the normal word regex.  Obviate the
|    current problems.

come on, we have been having the drivers called "c++" and "g++" for
nearly two decades.  
Tools that cannot cope  with libstdc++ are broken and should be fixed :-/

-- Gaby