On 3/6/06, Derrick S. [email protected] wrote:
On Mar 6, 2006, at 2:17 PM, Adam F. wrote:
Why “Capistrano”? Does this mean something? If not, it seems
needlessly confusing.http://jamis.jamisbuck.org/articles/2006/03/06/switchtower-renamed
Vlad the Deployer is awesome.
“Capistrano”…
It takes no skill to have an opinion about the name of a piece of
software.
It takes a lot of skill to create something as useful as Capistrano
and a lot of generosity to give it out for free.
Ultimately, if the software kicks ass, who cares what it’s called?
Just be glad it exists. We in the Ruby community have free software
that’s supported better than any commercial software I’ve ever
purchased and that kicks the ass of the deployment tools from every
other development environment I’ve ever touched.
Jamis, call it whatever you like. Thanks for writing it, and thanks
for giving it to us for free. I for one have no right to an opinion
about what you choose to call it.
–
Chad F.
http://chadfowler.com
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_rr/ (Rails Recipes - In Beta!)
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/mjwti/ (My Job Went to India,
and All I Got Was This Lousy Book)
http://rubycentral.org
http://rubygarden.org
http://rubygems.rubyforge.org (over one million gems served!)
On Mar 6, 2006, at 2:59 PM, Chad F. wrote:
purchased and that kicks the ass of the deployment tools from every
other development environment I’ve ever touched.Jamis, call it whatever you like. Thanks for writing it, and thanks
for giving it to us for free. I for one have no right to an opinion
about what you choose to call it.
Oh, you have every right to your opinion. I appreciate that you won’t
force your opinion on me, or imply I’m stupid for having my own
opinion, though. 
Thanks for the support, Chad.
What’s in a name? That which we call a Caspistrano by any other name
would
smell as sweet.
On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 04:48:11PM -0500, Nicholas S. wrote:
Actually, Capistrano is a delicious italian lunchmeat. The name fit’s
perfectly with Jamis’ deployment tool; both are lean and delicious,
well deserving of some fine cheese and a french roll.
I stand corrected.
–
- Adam
** Expert Technical Project and Business Management
**** System Performance Analysis and Architecture
****** [ http://www.adamfields.com ]
[ Adam Fields (weblog) - - entertaining hundreds of millions of eyeball atoms every day ] … Blog
[ Adam Fields Resume ]… Experience
[ Adam Fields | Flickr ] … Photos
[ http://www.aquicki.com/wiki ]…Wiki
I’m with Adam on this one. Meaningless names for things with a specific
function kinda suck. Why not Easy Deployer? Rake Autodeployer? Remote
Deployer? Distributed Deployer? Switchtower was nice because it was a
clear, apt metaphor for what the software does.
Even Application Pusher-Outer would be fine, in that when you tell
someone you just configured the Rails Application Pusher-Outer, they
know what you just did and what the Application Pusher-Outer does even
if they’ve never heard of it before.
Capistrano? That’s a development codename.
Think about it: Tomcat, Cocoon, Jasper, Ant. All meaningless names. One
developer can be talking to another and unless the person listening is
already familiar with the tool or API in question, it’s gibberish. On
the other hand, take ActiveRecord, ActionController, even rake. I hadn’t
gotten to the Hello World stage in learning Rails and remember reading
those terms and without flipping to a glossary or doing a Google search
I knew those things pertained to data access, MVC and application
maintenance tasks respectively.
How do developers know Capistrano is something they want/need if they
nead to read up on it just to find out what it is? Just because some
things get by without meaningful names (Macintosh, Excel, Oreo) it
doesn’t mean there isn’t significant benefit to having one.
-sk
Adam F. wrote:
On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 02:32:34PM -0500, Derrick S. wrote:
http://jamis.jamisbuck.org/articles/2006/03/06/switchtower-renamed
Why would this be confusing? Did switchtower really hold all that
much meaning as to the purpose of the software?Um. Yes.
A switch tower is an actual thing that controls where the trains go,
that prevents the trains from crashing into each other.That seems like a highly descriptive metaphor. Capistrano is
meaningless in this context.–
- Adam** Expert Technical Project and Business Management
**** System Performance Analysis and Architecture
****** [ http://www.adamfields.com ][ Adam Fields (weblog) - - entertaining hundreds of millions of eyeball atoms every day ] … Blog
[ Adam Fields Resume ]… Experience
[ Adam Fields | Flickr ] … Photos
[ http://www.aquicki.com/wiki ]…Wiki
On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 03:02:04PM -0700, Jamis B. wrote:
[…]
Jamis, call it whatever you like. Thanks for writing it, and thanks
for giving it to us for free. I for one have no right to an opinion
about what you choose to call it.Oh, you have every right to your opinion. I appreciate that you won’t
force your opinion on me, or imply I’m stupid for having my own
opinion, though.Thanks for the support, Chad.
I apologize if you got the impression that I was trying to force
anything on you or imply anything about your intelligence.
I thought we were just having a discussion.
The app itself rocks, dude.
–
- Adam
** Expert Technical Project and Business Management
**** System Performance Analysis and Architecture
****** [ http://www.adamfields.com ]
[ Adam Fields (weblog) - - entertaining hundreds of millions of eyeball atoms every day ] … Blog
[ Adam Fields Resume ]… Experience
[ Adam Fields | Flickr ] … Photos
[ http://www.aquicki.com/wiki ]…Wiki
On Mar 6, 2006, at 3:21 PM, Steve K. wrote:
I’m with Adam on this one. Meaningless names for things with a
specific
function kinda suck. Why not Easy Deployer? Rake Autodeployer? Remote
Deployer? Distributed Deployer? Switchtower was nice because it was a
clear, apt metaphor for what the software does.
Because it is not merely deployment software. Application deployment
just happens to be one of the things it does. SwitchTower wasn’t
descriptive of what the software did, either, and yet I never heard a
single complaint about it. If I had chosen Capistrano from day one,
no one would have complained about it, either.
At any rate, the decision is final. I’m not going to change the name
at this point. (That’s not a command for people to stop venting
spleen, just an FYI.)
On 6 Mar 2006, at 21:00, Pawel S. wrote:
This article refutes that theory. So do nearly all of the official and
unofficial Apple / Jobs biographies that mention the event that I’ve
come across.
Not read many accounts, but that refutation appears to be based on
the rainbow stripe not matching the pride flag which seems a bit…
well… inconclusive.
Take a look at that photo - the bite in the apple comes from the old
version of the logo where the lower case ‘a’ partially intersected
with the apple image.
For all we know, maybe that’s just where the a fitted best.
Ahh, well, I’m prepared to concede, however I don’t think it matters.
All I know is every time I see the logo I think of Turing and what he
went through, what he gave us, etc. and that can’t be a bad thing,
even if it was unintentional of the logo’s designers.
On 3/6/06, Paul R. [email protected] wrote:
of respect to the modern father of computing who died quite close to
Anyway, I don’t care about the name of software I use as long as:
a) I can remember it
b) I can spell it first time when I type it into Google trying to
debug errors
The funny part about that one is Google was supposed to be Googol, but
they misspelled it
I imagine they kept it for the same reason, most people would misspell
it anyway (and they seem quite convinced - gmail’s spell checker
flagged ‘Googol’)
c) It’s unique enough for it to show up in Google on the first page
at least
Good points, and they worked for many products with seamingly
meaningless names:
Google, Yahoo!, Monster.com, perl, Python, even Ruby 
Apart from c) which will no doubt be fixed when we all go blog this,
I see no problem.–
Paul R.
Rails mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
–
Bill G. (aka aGorilla)
The best answer to most questions is “it depends”.
On Mar 6, 2006, at 4:47 PM, Sean S. wrote:
FYI: The term "SwitchTower" is still used on the front page of the
manual. Wouldn’t want you to get in more trouble.
Thanks, Sean. There’s something broken with Hieraki, but I don’t know
what. I’ve changed the text (even DELETED the text) and the old text
still shows up.
Hopefully this can get resolved quickly.
On 3/6/06, Jamis B. [email protected] wrote:
multiple remote hosts. It was formerly known as SwitchTower.
so you’ll need to have at least Rake 0.7.0. You can still do "rake
- The cap utility uses more rake-like command-line semantics.
- For each of your Rails projects, do “cap -A .”, keeping your
Rails mailing list
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Rails mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
Page caching?
-Kyle
Product naming is painful and I don’t envy Jamis for having to go
through the process. Good names require no marketing to spread and
people just ‘get it’, bad names are never entirely bad, they just
require large amounts of ‘impressions’ to get the message across to the
consumer/users (typically that means $$'s, perhaps in open source that
means blog writeups and books).
I’m wondering if a small tweak to the new gem name might satisfy the
‘ease of grasp/ease of typing’ needs, the needs for a non-trademark
infringing name, and create a name that re-enforces what the product is
without having to spend time/resources on branding/marketing to get the
message across. Since I wasn’t privy to the original naming discussion
here’s my thought that I think would let us have our lunch meat and eat
it to:
‘CapDeploy’ - The Capistrano Parallel Remote Deployment and Remote
Execution System
Just my 2c,
Sanford
FYI: The term "SwitchTower" is still used on the front page of the
manual. Wouldn’t want you to get in more trouble.
http://manuals.rubyonrails.org/read/book/17
-S
- keeps the ‘cap’ command
- easy to type/read (capistrano isn’t awful, but it’s really hard on
the eyes fingers for the first 30mins if you’ve never seen it before).- re-enforces the deployment capabilities of the product (deploys
files and execution units).Just my 2c,
That would limit capistrano to just deploying files. It’s actually
more then that…
Anyways, it’s done. I’m sure in a few months you won’t even notice
the awkardness around the new name. Remember when firebird became
firefox?
–
Rick O.
http://techno-weenie.net
Rick O. wrote:
That would limit capistrano to just deploying files. It’s actually
more then that…
I thought I covered that angle pretty well (both files & execution
units):
‘CapDeploy’ - The Capistrano Parallel Remote Deployment and Remote
Execution System
[…]
Anyways, it’s done. I’m sure in a few months you won’t even notice
the awkardness around the new name. Remember when firebird became
firefox?
Both were easy to type and say, so I didn’t think much of the switch.
But yes, with enough impressions over time, just about any name is fine.
-San
On Mar 6, 2006, at 10:48 PM, Rick O. wrote:
That would limit capistrano to just deploying files. It’s actually
more then that…Anyways, it’s done. I’m sure in a few months you won’t even notice
the awkardness around the new name. Remember when firebird became
firefox?
Or when whatever-it-was-called became Camino. See … I can’t even
remember.
-Derrick S.
On 3/6/06, Adam F. [email protected] wrote:
It’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I think that
names at least try to have some relation to their purpose. Names for
products should have some reason why they’re better than other words
for that product, and Capistrano, while not bad, is simply no better
than anything else. Why not “Larry”, then? It’s at least short and
easy to remember.
I would like to voice my enthusiastic support for using this name
As one who’s spent time in San Juan Capistrano, I must say that my
first thought was of the historic train station an easy walk from the
mission. There is no switch yard there, but the name does invoke train
images for me.
–
John-Mason Shackelford
Software Developer
Pearson Educational Measurement
2510 North Dodge St.
Iowa City, IA 52245
ph. 319-354-9200x6214
[email protected]
http://pearsonedmeasurement.com
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