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Comment by actionowl | Hacker News Reader

We're google, we can pick any name we want, even if a very similar project is already using it. https://www.netbsd.org/docs/puffs/

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Creating a filesystem in user-space is “very similar”? I mean, they both involve files but…

http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?puffs+4.i386+NetBSD-7.1

What will I get if I type "sudo apt install puffs"?

What do I have if I see libpuffs.so somewhere?

That's a valid question but not the same as saying the projects are very similar. In that case in particular, the answer would come down to “Are you running on NetBSD?” and so the most likely answer is that the NetBSD package maintainer would package it as "google-puffs" or something like that.

Yeah, it'd be unfortunate, but not unprecedented. For example, Debian has both epiphany and epiphany-browser, which are two separate things.

I'm considering a name change: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/puffslang/cSrH-s7UqwA/disc...

As for the "We're google, we can pick any name we want" assumption that somebody else wrote earlier, https://github.com/google/puffs says "Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product, it is just code that happens to be owned by Google". Also, before the launch, I didn't find many hits for "puffs" when searching github.com projects, or searching "apt search puffs", or searching the Web in general for queries like [puffs programming], or uses of the ".puffs" file extension. It's not like I cackled maniacally as I deliberately screwed over the NetBSD puffs project, whether for myself or on behalf of Google, I just didn't find it. I am bad at searching. Sorry.

There are only so many combinations of letters that are short and pronouncible, so people will have to to reuse names eventually.

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