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Comment by twarge | Hacker News Reader

The real pyx is an absolutely wonderful graphing package. It's like Tex in that everything looks wonderful and publication-quality.

https://pyx-project.org/gallery/graph/index.html

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there's something about these comments ("name-collision") that drives me up the wall. do y'all realize multiple things can have the same name? for example, did you know there are many people with exactly the same names:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristenharris1/famous-people-same-n...

and yet no one bemoans this (hospitals don't consult name registries before filling out birth certificates). that's because it's almost always extremely clear from context.

> The real pyx

what makes that pyx any more "real" than this pyx? it's the extension of the language py plus a single letter. there are probably a thousand projects that could rightfully use that combination of letters as a name.

Human naming has nothing to do with software naming which seems obvious but apparently not. Python package creators should check the pypi registry for names and generally avoid name collisions where reasonable. Common sense applies for reduced confusion for users globally and also for potential legal issues if any party trademarks their software name. What makes one pyx more real than the other is one was first and took the spot on pypi. Simple as that. https://pypi.org/project/PyX/

> https://pypi.org/project/PyX/

the last release is Oct 16, 2022. are we doing this like jerseys - the name is now retired because pyx won all the championships?

That's barely 3 years...? I just released an update for a project I maintain that had had a 4 year gap between releases, but is still heavily used by a lot of people. I dread to think that we live in a world where software has arbitrary expiry dates...?

Some software just needs fewer updates. The actual repo had a few commits last year and even more the year before that.

Believe or not, some software can be ”complete”.

What are you suggesting? All packages do an annual release with a new beautiful section in their README to justify their existence?

it's the pyx you get with `pip install pyx`?

Agreed. I'm the author of a fairly popular dev environment project. Every so often you get people turning up enraged because I chose a name that some other project once used. In the situation I'm talking about it makes even less sense than pip -- it's a command-line executable. There's no one repository (although doesn't seem like Debian people would agree with that!). There's a multitude of package managers on different platforms. Furthermore, in case people hadn't noticed, there are these things called languages, countries, and cultures. There is no reason in general why there might not be package managers whose use is culturally or geographically non-uniform and perhaps entirely unfamiliar to those in other countries. So, what's the plan for checking whether a name is "taken" across human culture, history, and computing platforms? Silly out-dated notion.

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