[RFC] kbfiles: an extension to track binary files with less wasted bandwidth

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 2011-07-26 21:42, Na'Tosha Bard wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 9:10 PM, Adrian Buehlmann <adrian at cadifra.com
> <mailto:adrian at cadifra.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On 2011-07-26 20:23, Andrew Pritchard wrote:
>     > We are still in the process of cleaning up the code to ship with
>     Mercurial, but
>     > the current status can be seen at
>     > http://developers.kilnhg.com/Repo/Kiln/Group/Unstable/Files.
>      Before the 'real'
>     > pull request, we will collapse it into a single patch in the hgext
>     directory.
>     > Planned changes before then include removing compatibility shims
>     for old
>     > versions of Mercurial and some minor rebranding to remove mentions
>     of 'Kiln'
>     > from the code and repository layout.
>     >
>     > We would prefer to avoid renaming the extension if possible, both
>     to avoid
>     > adding extra code to handle both old repositories and new ones and
>     to reflect
>     > the heritage of the extension, but we understand that parts of the
>     Mercurial
>     > community may be opposed to the name 'kbfiles', and as such we are
>     willing to
>     > rename to 'terafiles' if the name would otherwise block the
>     extension from
>     > shipping with Mercurial.
> 
>     We got a request to support kbfiles in the TortoiseHg shell extension
>     (for Windows). I was a bit worried about seeing file paths like
>     ".hg/kilnbfiles/dirstate" (see function openbfdirstate in
>     kbfiles/bfutil.py).
> 
>     People may call me paranoid, but the reason why I'm a bit worried is
>     that the name "Kiln" is a registered trademark by FogCreek [1]. I do not
>     expect that they would ever forbid anyone using this name, but in theory
>     they could.
> 
>     Frankly, I'd prefer not giving any company whatsoever the ability to
>     "pull the plug" on anything related to Mercurial.
> 
>     [1] Registration number 3869331, United States Patent and Trademark
>     Office (see uspto.gov <http://uspto.gov>)
> 
> 
> My team uses kbfiles heavily and would like to see the extension shipped
> with mercurial as well.

Interesting.

> Regarding the name, I recall a discussion at the 1.9 sprint that
> suggested "HugeFiles" would be a good alternative name (I recall
> discussing this with Benjamin offlist, but I don't know what conclusion
> you guys came to on your end about it).  I started some work to do the
> renaming on my end to submit upstream as a patch, but discovered Kiln
> has some problems when it doesn't see a "kbfiles" extension enabled
> client-side, so I never got around to finishing it.  I can understand
> the concern Adrian has regarding FogCreek having a trademark on Kiln,
> and also I recall some people thinking "kbfiles" was a bit weird because
> it makes the user think of "kilobyte files" or "files in the size of
> kilobytes", which clearly do not need such an extension for usage in
> Mercurial.
> 
> Personally, I think "terafiles" also sounds quite strange, especially
> since it seems likely that people familiar with the family of
> bfile-related extensions will inadvertently say "tbfiles" :-)

Honestly, I don't really care that much about the name of the extension
itself, as long as we don't get into troubles by using registered
trademarks. So, if we can avoid the word "Kiln", I'm perfectly fine.

Using the name "kbfiles" seems safe to me (regarding trademarks) and I
have no qualms about it having significant contributions by "the Kiln
folks", or its provenance in general. IIUC, the initial work was done by
Greg anyway.