Tom wrote:
We won't find a general principle that holds in all cases but I do think it is worth discussing and perhaps coming up with some voluntary
principles that maintainers can sign up to. Looking to how other language ecosystems handle this issue may be helpful.
I am a bystander in this discussion, but reading it I couldn't help but think about how developers in other languages typically avoid this problem (and I don't think this will come as a surprise to anyone here) by giving libraries non-prosaic names. Relatedly, as a developer selecting dependencies for a project, I want to know "what do most people use to solve this particular problem?" It wouldn't matter to me whether the answer is a package named something whimsical and weird as long as it looks well- (and recently!) maintained and there is information on how to use it.
I wouldn't presume to offer this as a recommendation to this group, but I was a little surprised by the antagonistic direction of this conversation. Indeed, if there's a new and better approach to TOML parsing (and if I have that particular problem in the future...), I'd be happy to rely on that new approach (and the efforts of those involved), no matter what the package is called.
To be honest, though, it's tough for me to tell if Emily's original request is about forking a codebase or simply taking over the name and producing an entirely new codebase? In any case, the work sounds interesting.